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GK One-Line Question & Answer

15541+ short questions with short answers, covering every category and sub-category on the site — no long articles to scroll through. Good for a fast recap before an exam, or a few minutes of daily practice.

DBMS → Introduction to DBMS 30

Exclusive (X) lock allows
ONE transaction to read or write blocking all others
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Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) requires
Log written to stable storage BEFORE data page written to disk
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Redo in recovery
Re-applies operations of committed transactions to ensure durability after crash
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Undo in recovery
Reverses operations of uncommitted transactions to restore consistency
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ARIES recovery passes in order
Analysis, Redo, Undo
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Checkpoint in recovery is used to
Reduce redo work needed after crash
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No-Force policy means
Pages need NOT be forced to disk at commit - requires REDO on recovery
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Steal policy means
Dirty pages of uncommitted transactions CAN be written to disk - requires UNDO on recovery
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Optimistic CC performs best when
Conflicts are RARE - mostly reads few conflicts
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Multiple granularity locking allows
Different hierarchy levels: database, table, page, row
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IS (Intention-Shared) lock signals
Intent to set S locks at FINER granularity levels
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IX (Intention-Exclusive) lock signals
Intent to set X locks at FINER granularity levels
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Recoverable schedule ensures
T_j commits only AFTER all transactions whose data it read have committed
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Cascadeless schedule prevents
Cascading rollbacks by allowing reads ONLY of committed data
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ARIES Redo pass
Repeats ALL logged operations to bring DB to exact crash-time state
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ARIES Undo pass
Reverses loser (uncommitted at crash) transaction operations in reverse log order
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Log Sequence Number (LSN)
Uniquely identifies and orders each log record (monotonically increasing)
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Fuzzy checkpoint allows
Active transactions to continue while checkpoint record written to log
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The 'lost update' problem occurs when
Two transactions update same item and one update is overwritten by the other
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ARIES uses which buffer management policy combination
No-Force + Steal
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Rigorous 2PL holds
ALL locks (S and X) until transaction commits or aborts
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A database block/page is
Unit of data transfer between disk and memory (fixed-size)
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Seek time is
Time to move disk arm to the correct track
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Rotational latency is
Time for correct sector to rotate under read/write head
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Buffer pool is
Portion of main memory caching database pages
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LRU buffer replacement replaces
LEAST recently used page (oldest access time)
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Query cost is primarily measured by
Number of disk I/O operations
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Query optimization selects
Most efficient (lowest cost) execution plan from equivalent alternatives
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Pushing selection (σ) down operator tree
Reduces intermediate result sizes - fewer tuples flow to expensive operators
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Pipelining in query processing
Passes tuples directly from one operator to next without full materialization
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DBMS → Transactions 3

Cascading rollback occurs when
Rolling back T1 forces other transactions that read T1's dirty data to also roll back
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Timestamp-based CC assigns each transaction
Unique timestamp at start time for ordering operations
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Transaction state 'aborted' means
Rolled back and database restored to pre-transaction state
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DBMS → Indexes 5

A clustered index stores
Data in same sorted order as the index
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A dense index has
One index entry for EVERY record in the data file
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A sparse index has
Index entries for ONLY SOME records (typically one per data block)
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B+ tree supports
Both equality AND range queries with O(log n) performance
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Hash index is best for
Equality queries (exact match =)
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DBMS → Joins 2

Sort-Merge Join requires
Both relations sorted on join attribute
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Hash Join build phase
Hashes SMALLER relation into memory hash table
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