Two interviews did not reflect my skills and capabilities at all. They were too academically oriented and definitely too far from day-to-day working skills.

Therefore, 20 minutes after the phone call, with pressure loss and little Google help, I was able to find all answers with no difficulties. Smart people don’t learn solutions by heart, but create solutions (I was assuming Expedia was looking for smart people).

First phone interview questions:

• What is Referential Integrity?
• What is Entity Integrity?
• What is a correlated subquery?
• How to find differences between two queries?
• How to implement 1-1, 1-many, and many-many relations?
• Difference between PK and Unique Key?
• Difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes?
• What does the ‘no lock’ expression mean?
• Difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE?
• Different joins possible in SQL Server?
• What is a deadlock?
• What is an Entity Relationship Diagram?

Second phone interview questions:

• A table with an ‘employee’ column and a ‘salary’ column. How to get the name of the fourth most paid employee (see big data solution)?
• How to remove duplicate data in a table with no PK (see big data solution)?
• Difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE on SQL Server.
• Two tables sharing the same PK. Table A: id 1 and 2. Table B: id 2 and 4. Query listing ids in table A but not in table B (in our example, id 1 only).

15 theoretical questions with no interest on 12 years of IT experience.