Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Define candidate key, alternate key, composite key.

A candidate key is one that can identify each row of a table uniquely. Generally a candidate key becomes the primary key of the table. If the table has more than one candidate key, one of them will become the primary key, and the rest are called alternate keys.

What is bit datatype and what's the information that can be stored inside a bit column?

Bit datatype is used to store Boolean information like 1 or 0 (true or false). Until SQL Server 6.5 bit datatype could hold either a 1 or 0 and there was no support for NULL. But from SQL Server 7.0 onwards, bit datatype can represent a third state, which is NULL.

What are user defined datatypes and when you should go for them?

User defined datatypes let you extend the base SQL Server datatypes by providing a descriptive name, and format to the database. Take for example, in your database, there is a column called Flight_Num which appears in many tables. In all these tables it should be varchar(8). In this case you could create a user defined datatype called Flight_num_type of varchar(8) and use it across all your tables.

What's the difference between a primary key and a unique key?

Both primary key and unique enforce uniqueness of the column on which they are defined. But by default primary key creates a clustered index on the column, where are unique creates a nonclustered index by default. Another major difference is that, primary key doesn't allow NULLs, but unique key allows one NULL only.

How do you implement one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships while designing tables?

One-to-One relationship can be implemented as a single table and rarely as two tables with primary and foreign key relationships. One-to-Many relationships are implemented by splitting the data into two tables with primary key and foreign key relationships. Many-to-Many relationships are implemented using a junction table with the keys from both the tables forming the composite primary key of the junction table.

What is denormalization and when would you go for it?





As the name indicates, denormalization is the reverse process of normalization. It's the controlled introduction of redundancy in to the database design. It helps improve the query performance as the number of joins could be reduced.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

What property must you set, and what method must you call in your code, in order to bind the data from Some data source to the Repeater control?


Set the DataMember property to the name of the table to bnd to.(if this propery is not set, by default the first table in the dataset is used)
DataBind method ,use this method to bind data from a source to a server control. This method is commonly used after retrieving a data set through a database query.


Explain the different parts that constitute ASP.NET application.

Content, program logic and configuration file constitute an ASP.NET application. Content files Content files include static text, images ...