Wednesday, May 30, 2007

MYSQL FAQS 02

MySQL Interview Questions And Answers [MySQL Server Frequently Asked Questions ,MySQL Server FAQ ]

How would you change a table to InnoDB?
ALTER TABLE techinterviews_questions ENGINE innodb;

When you create a table, and then run SHOW CREATE TABLE on it, you occasionally get different results than what you typed in. What does MySQL modify in your newly created tables?
1. VARCHARs with length less than 4 become CHARs
2. CHARs with length more than 3 become VARCHARs.
3. NOT NULL gets added to the columns declared as PRIMARY KEYs
4. Default values such as NULL are specified for each column

How do I find out all databases starting with ‘tech’ to which I have access to?
SHOW DATABASES LIKE ‘tech%’;

How do you concatenate strings in MySQL?
CONCAT (string1, string2, string3)

How do you get a portion of a string?
SELECT SUBSTR(title, 1, 10) from techinterviews_questions;

What’s the difference between CHAR_LENGTH and LENGTH?
The first is, naturally, the character count. The second is byte count. For the Latin characters the numbers are the same, but they’re not the same for Unicode and other encodings.

How do you convert a string to UTF-8?

SELECT (techinterviews_question USING utf8);

What do % and _ mean inside LIKE statement?
% corresponds to 0 or more characters, _ is exactly one character.

What does + mean in REGEXP?
At least one character. Appendix G. Regular Expressions from MySQL manual is worth perusing before the interview.

How do you get the month from a timestamp?
SELECT MONTH(techinterviews_timestamp) from techinterviews_questions;

How do you offload the time/date handling to MySQL?
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(techinterviews_timestamp, ‘%Y-%m-%d’) from techinterviews_questions; A similar TIME_FORMAT function deals with time.

How do you add three minutes to a date?
ADDDATE(techinterviews_publication_date, INTERVAL 3 MINUTE)

What’s the difference between Unix timestamps and MySQL timestamps?
Internally Unix timestamps are stored as 32-bit integers, while MySQL timestamps are stored in a similar manner, but represented in readable YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format.

How do you convert between Unix timestamps and MySQL timestamps?
UNIX_TIMESTAMP converts from MySQL timestamp to Unix timestamp, FROM_UNIXTIME converts from Unix timestamp to MySQL timestamp.

What are ENUMs used for in MySQL?
You can limit the possible values that go into the table. CREATE TABLE months (month ENUM ‘January’, ‘February’, ‘March’,…); INSERT months VALUES (’April’);

MYSQL FAQS 03

MySQL Interview Questions And Answers [MySQL Server Frequently Asked Questions ,MySQL Server FAQ ]

How are ENUMs and SETs represented internally?
As unique integers representing the powers of two, due to storage optimizations.

How do you start and stop MySQL on Windows?
net start MySQL, net stop MySQL

How do you start MySQL on Linux?
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Explain the difference between mysql and mysql interfaces in PHP?
mysqli is the object-oriented version of mysql library functions.

What’s the default port for MySQL Server?
3306

What does tee command do in MySQL?
tee followed by a filename turns on MySQL logging to a specified file. It can be stopped by command note.

Can you save your connection settings to a conf file?
Yes, and name it ~/.my.conf. You might want to change the permissions on the file to 600, so that it’s not readable by others.

How do you change a password for an existing user via mysqladmin?
mysqladmin -u root -p password "newpassword"

Use mysqldump to create a copy of the database?
mysqldump -h mysqlhost -u username -p mydatabasename > dbdump.sql

Have you ever used MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser?
Describe the tasks you accomplished with these tools.

What are some good ideas regarding user security in MySQL?
There is no user without a password. There is no user without a user name. There is no user whose Host column contains % (which here indicates that the user can log in from anywhere in the network or the Internet). There are as few users as possible (in the ideal case only root) who have unrestricted access.

Explain the difference between MyISAM Static and MyISAM Dynamic. ?
In MyISAM static all the fields have fixed width. The Dynamic MyISAM table would include fields such as TEXT, BLOB, etc. to accommodate the data types with various lengths. MyISAM Static would be easier to restore in case of corruption, since even though you might lose some data, you know exactly where to look for the beginning of the next record.

What does myisamchk do?
It compressed the MyISAM tables, which reduces their disk usage.

Explain advantages of InnoDB over MyISAM?
Row-level locking, transactions, foreign key constraints and crash recovery.

Explain advantages of MyISAM over InnoDB?
Much more conservative approach to disk space management - each MyISAM table is stored in a separate file, which could be compressed then with myisamchk if needed. With InnoDB the tables are stored in tablespace, and not much further optimization is possible. All data except for TEXT and BLOB can occupy 8,000 bytes at most. No full text indexing is available for InnoDB. TRhe COUNT(*)s execute slower than in MyISAM due to tablespace complexity.

MYSQL FAQS 04

MySQL Interview Questions And Answers [MySQL Server Frequently Asked Questions ,MySQL Server FAQ ]

What are HEAP tables in MySQL?
HEAP tables are in-memory. They are usually used for high-speed temporary storage. No TEXT or BLOB fields are allowed within HEAP tables. You can only use the comparison operators = and <=>. HEAP tables do not support AUTO_INCREMENT. Indexes must be NOT NULL.

How do you control the max size of a HEAP table?
MySQL config variable max_heap_table_size.

What are CSV tables?
Those are the special tables, data for which is saved into comma-separated values files. They cannot be indexed.

Explain federated tables. ?
Introduced in MySQL 5.0, federated tables allow access to the tables located on other databases on other servers.

What is SERIAL data type in MySQL?
BIGINT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT

What happens when the column is set to AUTO INCREMENT and you reach the maximum value for that table?
It stops incrementing. It does not overflow to 0 to prevent data losses, but further inserts are going to produce an error, since the key has been used already.

Explain the difference between BOOL, TINYINT and BIT. ?
Prior to MySQL 5.0.3: those are all synonyms. After MySQL 5.0.3: BIT data type can store 8 bytes of data and should be used for binary data.

Explain the difference between FLOAT, DOUBLE and REAL. ?
FLOATs store floating point numbers with 8 place accuracy and take up 4 bytes. DOUBLEs store floating point numbers with 16 place accuracy and take up 8 bytes. REAL is a synonym of FLOAT for now.

If you specify the data type as DECIMAL (5,2), what’s the range of values that can go in this table?
999.99 to -99.99. Note that with the negative number the minus sign is considered one of the digits.

What happens if a table has one column defined as TIMESTAMP?
That field gets the current timestamp whenever the row gets altered.

But what if you really want to store the timestamp data, such as the publication date of the article?
Create two columns of type TIMESTAMP and use the second one for your real data.

Explain data type TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ?
The column exhibits the same behavior as a single timestamp column in a table with no other timestamp columns.

What does TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP data type do?
On initialization places a zero in that column, on future updates puts the current value of the timestamp in.

Explain TIMESTAMP DEFAULT ‘2006:09:02 17:38:44? ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. ?
A default value is used on initialization, a current timestamp is inserted on update of the row.

If I created a column with data type VARCHAR(3), what would I expect to see in MySQL table?
CHAR(3), since MySQL automatically adjusted the data type.