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Therap Database Engineer

Interview Stages

The selection process has 4 stages,

  1. Initial screening: This round is taken in written format
  2. 1st technical round The first round is taken by the BD team
  3. 2nd technical round: This round is typically taken by both USA and BD team. However, the final selection is done by the US team.
  4. HR Round: This is the final stage before onboarding and typically deals with salary negotiation.

Database Questions

Design an ERD of online restaurant management system
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What is Database Transaction
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Briefly explain ACID properties
ACID is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps. Databases that support this are called ACID compliance. The properties are
  • Atomicity: Each statement in a transaction (to read, write, update or delete data) is treated as a single unit. Either the entire statement is executed, or none of it is executed.
  • Consistency: Ensures the databases remain consistent following some predefined business logic both before and after the transaction
  • Isolation: Each transaction executes in such a way that one is not affected by other s though they were occurring only one.
  • Durability: The data changes by a successfull transaction is saved even in the event of system failure

IMPORTANT

Atomicity, isolation and durability are properties of the database, whereas consistency is a property of the application. The C in ACID was tossed in to make the acronym work. [ref: Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data Intensive Applications]

What is normalization and denormalization
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Briefly explain BCNF
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Explain data warehousing
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Explain data redundancy
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Briefly mention the differences between stored procedure, function and trigger
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Briefly mention the differences between delete, drop and truncate
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Briefly mention the differences between where and having clause
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Briefly mention the differences between candidate key and super key
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A schema has entities like CUSTOMERS, ORDERS, ORDER_ITEMS, PRODUCTS, PRODUCT_DETAILS, WAREHOUSES, INVENTORIES. Data fields of entities and cardinality relationships were given in the figure. Questions included from <> 1. Group by, Order by, Join <> 2. Extracting month and year from oracle dates <> 3. Find ranks based on some criterion. The extremely hard question was - find top 10 customers based on their total amount spent in 2023. This one involved the following topics: aggregation, join of multiple tables, nested sub-query, year extraction from date. The book of Sukarna sir contains one/two such exercises. Practise them properly
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