What are the tables in MySQL? Explain the types.

 This is a must-know MySQL interview question. Let’s see the answer-

MySQL stores everything in logical tables. Tables can be thought of as the core storage structure of MySQL. And hence tables are also known as storage engines. Here are the storage engines provided by MySQL:

· MyISAM – MyISAM is the default storage engine for MySQL. It extends the former ISAM storage engine. MyISAM offers big storage, up to 256TB! The tables can also be compressed to get extra storage. MyISAM tables are not transaction-safe. 

· MERGE – A MERGE table is a virtual table that consolidates different MyISAM tables that have a comparable structure to one table. MERGE tables use the indexes of the base tables, as they do not have indexes of their own.

How To Delete Duplicate Rows in MySQL

 Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn various ways to delete duplicate rows in MySQL.

In the previous tutorial, we have shown you how to find duplicate values in a table. Once the duplicates rows are identified, you may want to delete them to clean up your data.

Prepare sample data

The following script creates table contacts and inserts sample data into the contacts table for the demonstration.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS contacts;

CREATE TABLE contacts (
    id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    first_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
    last_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, 
    email VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL
);

INSERT INTO contacts (first_name,last_name,email) 
VALUES ('Carine ','Schmitt','carine.schmitt@verizon.net'),
       ('Jean','King','jean.king@me.com'),
       ('Peter','Ferguson','peter.ferguson@google.com'),
       ('Janine ','Labrune','janine.labrune@aol.com'),
       ('Jonas ','Bergulfsen','jonas.bergulfsen@mac.com'),
       ('Janine ','Labrune','janine.labrune@aol.com'),
       ('Susan','Nelson','susan.nelson@comcast.net'),
       ('Zbyszek ','Piestrzeniewicz','zbyszek.piestrzeniewicz@att.net'),
       ('Roland','Keitel','roland.keitel@yahoo.com'),
       ('Julie','Murphy','julie.murphy@yahoo.com'),
       ('Kwai','Lee','kwai.lee@google.com'),
       ('Jean','King','jean.king@me.com'),
       ('Susan','Nelson','susan.nelson@comcast.net'),
       ('Roland','Keitel','roland.keitel@yahoo.com');
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Note that you can execute this script to recreate test data after you execute a DELETE statement.

How To Find Duplicate Values in MySQL

 Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to find duplicate values of one or more columns in MySQL.

Data duplication happens because of many reasons. Finding duplicate values is one of the important tasks that you must deal with when working with the databases.

Setting up a sample table

First, create a table named contacts with four columns: id, first_name, last_name, and email.

CREATE TABLE contacts (
    id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    first_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
    last_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
    email VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL
);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Second, inserts rows into the contacts table:

INSERT INTO contacts (first_name,last_name,email) 
VALUES ('Carine ','Schmitt','carine.schmitt@verizon.net'),
       ('Jean','King','jean.king@me.com'),
       ('Peter','Ferguson','peter.ferguson@google.com'),
       ('Janine ','Labrune','janine.labrune@aol.com'),
       ('Jonas ','Bergulfsen','jonas.bergulfsen@mac.com'),
       ('Janine ','Labrune','janine.labrune@aol.com'),
       ('Susan','Nelson','susan.nelson@comcast.net'),
       ('Zbyszek ','Piestrzeniewicz','zbyszek.piestrzeniewicz@att.net'),
       ('Roland','Keitel','roland.keitel@yahoo.com'),
       ('Julie','Murphy','julie.murphy@yahoo.com'),
       ('Kwai','Lee','kwai.lee@google.com'),
       ('Jean','King','jean.king@me.com'),
       ('Susan','Nelson','susan.nelson@comcast.net'),
       ('Roland','Keitel','roland.keitel@yahoo.com');
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

What are some of the advantages of using MySQL?

 

• Flexibility: MySQL runs on all operating systems
• Power: MySQL focuses on performance
• Enterprise-Level SQL Features: MySQL had for some time been lacking in advanced features such as subqueries, views, and stored procedures.
• Full-Text Indexing and Searching
• Query Caching: This helps enhance the speed of MySQL greatly
• Replication: One MySQL server can be duplicated on another, providing numerous advantages
• Configuration and Security

Column Indexes

 The most common type of index involves a single column, storing copies of the values from that column in a data structure, allowing fast lookups for the rows with the corresponding column values. The B-tree data structure lets the index quickly find a specific value, a set of values, or a range of values, corresponding to operators such as =, >, ≤, BETWEEN, IN, and so on, in a WHERE clause.

The maximum number of indexes per table and the maximum index length is defined per storage engine. See Chapter 15, The InnoDB Storage Engine, and Chapter 16, Alternative Storage Engines. All storage engines support at least 16 indexes per table and a total index length of at least 256 bytes. Most storage engines have higher limits.

For additional information about column indexes, see Section 13.1.15, “CREATE INDEX Statement”.

• Index Prefixes

• FULLTEXT Indexes

• Spatial Indexes

• Indexes in the MEMORY Storage Engine

Index Prefixes

With col_name(N) syntax in an index specification for a string column, you can create an index that uses only the first N characters of the column. Indexing only a prefix of column values in this way can make the index file much smaller. When you index a BLOB or TEXT column, you must specify a prefix length for the index. For example:

CREATE TABLE test (blob_col BLOB, INDEX(blob_col(10)));

Prefixes can be up to 767 bytes long for InnoDB tables that use the REDUNDANT or COMPACT row format. The prefix length limit is 3072 bytes for InnoDB tables that use the DYNAMIC or COMPRESSED row format. For MyISAM tables, the prefix length limit is 1000 bytes.

Note

Prefix limits are measured in bytes, whereas the prefix length in CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, and CREATE INDEX statements is interpreted as number of characters for nonbinary string types (CHAR, VARCHAR, TEXT) and number of bytes for binary string types (BINARY, VARBINARY, BLOB). Take this into account when specifying a prefix length for a nonbinary string column that uses a multibyte character set.

If a search term exceeds the index prefix length, the index is used to exclude non-matching rows, and the remaining rows are examined for possible matches.

For additional information about index prefixes, see Section 13.1.15, “CREATE INDEX Statement”.

FULLTEXT Indexes

FULLTEXT indexes are used for full-text searches. Only the InnoDB and MyISAM storage engines support FULLTEXT indexes and only for CHAR, VARCHAR, and TEXT columns. Indexing always takes place over the entire column and column prefix indexing is not supported. For details, see Section 12.10, “Full-Text Search Functions”.

Optimizations are applied to certain kinds of FULLTEXT queries against single InnoDB tables. Queries with these characteristics are particularly efficient:

• FULLTEXT queries that only return the document ID, or the document ID and the search rank.

• FULLTEXT queries that sort the matching rows in descending order of score and apply a LIMIT clause to take the top N matching rows. For this optimization to apply, there must be no WHERE clauses and only a single ORDER BY clause in descending order.

• FULLTEXT queries that retrieve only the COUNT(*) value of rows matching a search term, with no additional WHERE clauses. Code the WHERE clause as WHERE MATCH(text) AGAINST ('other_text'), without any > 0 comparison operator.

For queries that contain full-text expressions, MySQL evaluates those expressions during the optimization phase of query execution. The optimizer does not just look at full-text expressions and make estimates, it actually evaluates them in the process of developing an execution plan.

An implication of this behavior is that EXPLAIN for full-text queries is typically slower than for non-full-text queries for which no expression evaluation occurs during the optimization phase.

EXPLAIN for full-text queries may show Select tables optimized away in the Extra column due to matching occurring during optimization; in this case, no table access need occur during later execution.

Spatial Indexes

You can create indexes on spatial data types. MyISAM and InnoDB support R-tree indexes on spatial types. Other storage engines use B-trees for indexing spatial types (except for ARCHIVE, which does not support spatial type indexing).

Indexes in the MEMORY Storage Engine

The MEMORY storage engine uses HASH indexes by default, but also supports BTREE indexes.

Foreign Key Optimization

 If a table has many columns, and you query many different combinations of columns, it might be efficient to split the less-frequently used data into separate tables with a few columns each, and relate them back to the main table by duplicating the numeric ID column from the main table. That way, each small table can have a primary key for fast lookups of its data, and you can query just the set of columns that you need using a join operation. Depending on how the data is distributed, the queries might perform less I/O and take up less cache memory because the relevant columns are packed together on disk. (To maximize performance, queries try to read as few data blocks as possible from disk; tables with only a few columns can fit more rows in each data block.)

What is the Traditional Network Library for a system?

In either Windows or POSIX systems, the named pipes provide ways of inter-process communications to connect different processes running on the same machine. It dispenses with the necessity of using the network stack, and data can be sent without affecting the performance. Servers set up named pipes to listen to requests. The client process needs to know the specific pipe name to send the request.

What are the features of MySQL?

MySQL provides cross-platform support, a wide range of interfaces for application programming, and has many stored procedures like triggers and cursors that help in managing the database.

How and why use SQL Server?

 SQL Server is free and anyone can download and use it. The application uses SQL (Structured Query Language), and it is easy to use.

Why do we use SQL constraints? Which constraints we can use while creating a database in SQL?

 Constraints are used to set the rules for all records in the table. If any constraints get violated then it can abort the action that caused it.

Constraints are defined while creating the database itself with the CREATE TABLE statement or even after the table is created once with the ALTER TABLE statement.

There are 5 major constraints are used in SQL, such as

• NOT NULL: That indicates that the column must have some value and cannot be left NULL.
• UNIQUE: This constraint is used to ensure that each row and column has a unique value and no value is being repeated in any other row or column.
• PRIMARY KEY: This constraint is used in association with NOT NULL and UNIQUE constraints such as on one or the combination of more than one column to identify the particular record with a unique identity.
• FOREIGN KEY: It is used to ensure the referential integrity of data in the table. It matches the value in one table with another using the PRIMARY KEY.
• CHECK: It ensures whether the value in columns fulfills the specified condition.

What are different Clauses used in SQL?

 WHERE Clause: This clause is used to define the condition, extract and display only those records which fulfill the given condition.

Syntax:

SELECT column_name(s) 
 FROM table_name 
 WHERE condition;

GROUP BY Clause: It is used with SELECT statement to group the result of the executed query using the value specified in it. It matches the value with the column name in tables and groups the end result accordingly.

Syntax:

SELECT column_name(s)
 FROM table_name
 GROUP BY column_name;

HAVING clause: This clause is used in association with the GROUP BY clause. It is applied to each group of results or the entire result as a single group. It is much similar as WHERE clause but the only difference is you cannot use it without GROUP BY clause

Syntax:

 
SELECT column_name(s) 
 FROM table_name 
 GROUP BY column_name 
 HAVING condition;

ORDER BY clause: This clause is used to define the order of the query output either in ascending (ASC) or in descending (DESC). Ascending (ASC) is set as the default one but descending (DESC) is set explicitly.

Syntax:

SELECT column_name(s) 
 FROM table_name 
 WHERE condition 
 ORDER BY column_name ASC|DESC;

USING clause: USING clause comes in use while working with SQL JOIN. It is used to check equality based on columns when tables are joined. It can be used instead of the ON clause in JOIN.

Syntax:

SELECT column_name(s) 
 FROM table_name 
 JOIN table_name 
 USING (column_name);

What are the different types of statements supported by SQL?

There are 3 types of SQL statements:

a) DDL (Data Definition Language): It is used to define the database structure such as tables. It includes three statements such as CREATE, ALTER, and DROP.

Also read =>> MySQL Create Table Tutorial

Some of the DDL Commands are listed below:

CREATE: It is used for creating the table.

CREATE TABLE table_name column_name1 data_type(size), column_name2 data_type(size), column_name3 data_type(size),

ALTER: The ALTER table is used for modifying the existing table object in the database.

ALTER TABLE table_name  ADD column_name datatype

OR

ALTER TABLE table_name DROP COLUMN column_name

b) DML (Data Manipulation Language): These statements are used to manipulate the data in records. Commonly used DML statements are INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

The SELECT statement is used as a partial DML statement, used to select all or relevant records in the table.

c) DCL (Data Control Language): These statements are used to set privileges such as GRANT and REVOKE database access permission to the specific user.