Top 25 Common SQL Interview Questions and Answers

Mikhail Raevskiy
7 min readAug 22, 2020

SQL interview questions are common, and you need to have a good understanding of how to work with databases in order not to fail. This list below presents the basic SQL questions and tasks that are common in job interviews and the answers to them.

Source: Pexels

📕Theory Q&A📕

👉1. What is DBMS?

Let’s say there is a large database that many employees use: someone is looking for information, and someone is changing or even deleting it. To properly process all these requests, you need special software, and it is this software that is called the database management system (DBMS).

👉 2. What types of DBMS do you know?

This SQL question is about not just naming but also giving a short description of each type.

There are two types of DBMS :

  1. Relational, which supports establishing relationships between tables using primary and foreign keys. An example is MySQL.
  2. In contrast, non-relational DBMSs assume the absence of such mechanisms for linking data from different segments. An example is MongoDB

👉3. What is a Primary Key?

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Mikhail Raevskiy

Bioinformatician at Oncobox Inc. (@oncobox). Research Associate