DBMS VIVA

At last , an interesting viva !

I would like to remember it as one of the rare viva's when hideous Maggu was cornered by a teacher.

FROM LEFT , Maggu , me , Ballu , Mnm.

It all started with a simple ACID question ( yes the law of attraction does work) , which was precisely what i had studied just before the viva. Unfortunately, the question was for Maggu who luckily messed it up by saying 'I' in ACID for "INTEGRITY" (lawl). But the teacher was no less crafty , he knowingly agreed with maggu and passed on the question to mnm who was wondering what integrity was (more lawls). Then Mr.ballu came into picture

Ballu : "Sir , integrity woh hota hai , jab do transaction saath chalti hain , both sir jab both , jab sir dono ko pata nahin hota , sir aapas main independent....."

Sir : "This is integrity ? huh ? Accha tell me what is isolation"

Gotcha ballu [:P] , ballu was bewildered until he realized the 'I' was for Isolation not Integrity.Some more genreal questions towards me , which i skillfully answered. Then ballu was asked again , what does he know in DBMS ,to which ballu promptly replied "Sir , serilizability , wait-die , wound-die ". So there was a question "What are serial shedules?" , exhilirated by the question ballu started firing out some gibberish in Hin-glish,but alas to his dismay he could't make the teacher understand his point.

Then came the conceptual questions ,
SIR : "Accha , who was saying he knows normalization ".
ME : "Sir , I said ".
Sir : "Good , ok make a table which is on 1st normal form but not
in second normal form. All of you".
( piece of cake huh ? )

I started thinking of a nice real time example , possibly banking , but then i realized i didnt have whole day , so i showed him simple A, B, C, D thing and illustrated my point via functional dependencies.Then maggu was inquired about his answer, ok first lemme give you an idea as to what he had done on paper. There was this bullshit employee table , with some flamboyant attributes like emp_id , emp_name and so on.
( In a disgustingly gruesome British accent )
Maggu : "Sir, I have made this employee table , in this i have an
employee name,an employee id , an ".
Sir : "I can see that , come to the point ".
Maggu : "Sir, in this we will have to decompose this into 3 tables,
because this is not "
Sir : "Decompose ki baat to baad main hai , i just asked you to
make a table which is not in 2 normal but is in 1 normal
form"

Then Maggu was like sir ye sir woh (lawl).Then mnm was asked to show what he had done , again some baseless explanation , i think he was confused between Partial dependency and Transitive dependency.Nonetheless i cleared up his doubts later [:P].Then came the turn of ballu, same ol' 'Sir ismain aise , usmain waise ' crap.
Next question write an SQL query to delete a colomn from a table if it is actually possible to do so. Setting aside some minor confusions , this was the only question answered almost correctly by all.Hmmm, let me see ,I can remember one last question and it indeed was the last one.It was to write a query to display the names of all teachers who were in the same deptt as 'Alka Mam' ( i was wondering y the external chose the name alka huh? kya chakkar hai huh? [:P] ) and obviously alka's name shouldnt be displayed. All of them except mnm (who doesnt believe in letting his expressions come out to the face) were taken back, completely abashed by the question.I have never practised SQL as such but nonetheless i was able to produce a correct query.After seeing ballu's query, teacher was partially irritated and asked him to find his mistake himself. Mnm gave him a total chu***a query which started with a 'select * ' when he only asked us to give teacher name and contained some more irrelevant stuff.So mnm was banged a little over this ,Maggu finally did something partially right but he had absolutely no idea watsoever as to how one could possibly hide alka's name from the displayed list.


All in all, it was pleasent amusing experience atlest for me , or maybe i am used to seeing the comical view of every other situation i deal with and i am contented not with the fact that mine went alright but because Maggu's went bad.

Dasvidaniya :)