The database industry is an ever-evolving field that plays a critical role in the storage and management of data in organizations of all sizes. Databases are the backbone of modern information systems and are used to store and manage vast amounts of data, ranging from simple lists of names and addresses to complex financial and business records. From small businesses to large corporations, databases have become a critical component of the modern business landscape.
The database industry has a rich history and a wealth of knowledge to explore. From the early days of the first database management systems to the current state of the art in cloud computing and big data, the database industry has undergone massive changes and continues to evolve. Whether you are a database administrator, a software engineer, or just someone interested in technology, database industry trivia is a great way to test your knowledge and learn something new.
Here are some examples of database industry trivia questions: What is the most widely used database management system? What is SQL and how does it work? What are the differences between a relational database and a non-relational database? What is NoSQL and how is it different from traditional databases? These questions and others like them provide a glimpse into the world of databases and the fascinating field of data management.
104 Database Industry Trivia Questions Ranked From Easiest to Hardest (Updated for 2024)
- What was the most popular database management system in the world in 2022? The name also applies to someone who wise insightful and prophetic.
Answer: Oracle
- The four properties that are maintained by a standard database management system from what four-letter acronym? The acronym is spelled the same as a chemical substance that neutralizes alkalis and is the opposite of a base.
Answer: ACID
- Which cloud-based relational database management system by Amazon shares a name with a beautiful night sky phenomenon you’d also call the northern lights?
Answer: Aurora
- What “B” term refers to any database data that is long varbinary? It’s also the name of a 1958 Steve McQueen horror movie about a murderous gelatinous mass.
Answer: BLOB
- In SQL, the command ALTER TABLE will let you add, delete, or change what vertical feature of a table in your database?
Answer: Column
- In the early 1970s, Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce developed a database management server that was originally called Structured English Query English, but is known by which 3-letter name to today’s programmers?
Answer: SQL
- HANA is the name of the relational database management system developed by what German corporation, which is, by revenue, the largest non-American software company in the world?
Answer: SAP
- Which programming language you might encounter in database management sounds like a snake but was actually named for a "completely different" group of British comedians?
Answer: Python
- You might use it in your office, but which open-source database by Apache has a logo that looks like it belongs in your living room? (Hint: The word that comes before “DB” in the name is actually an acronym)
Answer: CouchDB
- Which term describes a technique for partitioning a big set of data horizontally so that each smaller section can be stored separately?
Answer: Sharding
- A Rochester, New York developed what open-source operating system written in way more than three lines of code and named for what short poetry form?
Answer: Haiku
- What “C” term refers to a foreign key attribute that automatically migrates the changes made to a referenced table? Fill in the one word “C” blank, also used to describe a group of several small waterfalls that fall down a rocky slope.
Answer: Cascade
- What database management company, debuting in 1996, gets its name from being a developmental successor to the Ingres database from the University of California, Berkeley?
Answer: Postgres
- What is the term given to an action that ends a database transaction and makes permanent all changes performed in the transaction?
Answer: Commit
- Sakila the dolphin is the mascot of what open-source database management system that has a possessive pronoun in its name?
Answer: MySQL
- PlanetScale, a server-less SQL database platform, offers what “R” function, allowing users to revert a migration with zero downtime or data loss? Its name is the same a button on your remote control that allows you to go backwards during a movie.
Answer: PlanetScale Rewind
- Founded in 2012 and launched two years later, what is the name of the San Mateo, California-based data company that was named because of the shared love for winter sports that both founders have?
Answer: Snowflake
- In SQL, -- is used to start a single line of what in a code?
Answer: Comment
- What talking paper fastener, who served as a virtual assistant in Microsoft Office programs from 1997 until the mid-2000s, will be making a comeback as an emoji, according to the company?
Answer: Clippy
- “CREATE,” “DROP,” and “TRUNCATE” are examples of DDL commands you might use in SQL. What is DDL an acronym for?
Answer: Data Definition Language
- CDC monitors for differences in a database and keeps track of them—for example, identifying and logging when data is added or removed from a table. What is CDC an acronym for?
Answer: Change Data Capture
- It makes sense that what data platform is cloud-based, since the precipitation that inspired its name is also stored in clouds?
Answer: Snowflake
- When determining a database's ACID-ity, it's being judged on consistency, isolation, durability, and what explosive, all-or-nothing "A"-word?
Answer: Atomic / Atomicity
- Founded in 2003, what company won a Codie award for "Best Business Intelligence Solution" in 2008 and was aquired by Salesforce in 2019?
Answer: Tableau
- Jack Dorsey is most known for co-founding Twitter, but he is also CEO of what tech company that's well known for its credit card readers?
Answer: Block
- What starts-with-a-C software-development tool translates high-level language programs into the machine-language instructions that a particular processor can understand and execute?
Answer: Compiler
- An ERD is helpful when you need a visual to understand how the tables in your database are connected. What does the acronym ERD stand for?
Answer: Entity Relationship Diagram
- Not to be confused with the red bird, what term in database query development means “here’s how many unique values are in this column relative to how many rows are in the table?”
Answer: Cardinality
- What “R” database software, an in-memory data structure store with a red stacked logo, was originally written by Salvatore Sanfilippo in 2009?
Answer: Redis
- While cleaned-up data can be kept in a warehouse, which term is used for a repository for raw data (you could say au naturel)?
Answer: Lake
- No flexibility on the right answer, here. Launched in 2006, Amazon's EC2 stands for what Compute Cloud?
Answer: Elastic
- What term refers to a situation in which resources are held by two or more connections that are each needed by the other connections, meaning that they are stuck in an infinite wait loop?
Answer: Deadlock
- What hyphenated, "large"-sounding adjective describes a database that stores the most significant byte of a word at the smallest memory address?
Answer: Big-Endian
- In databases, what term is given to a conceptual structure consisting of a set of homogeneous elements and is based on the principle of last in first out (LIFO)?
Answer: Stack
- Kubernetes was not named Kubernetes until it was open sourced by Google in 2014. Prior to that, it was known by what four-letter name of an alien species in the "Star Trek" franchise?
Answer: Borg
- Showing a healthy distrust of vowels, Singaporean database company Bluzelle sells native blockchain tokens with what guessable three-letter name?
Answer: BLZ
- Common, HDFS, YARN, MapReduce, and Ozone are key modules in what popular open-source big data framework managed by the Apache Software Foundation?
Answer: Hadoop
- What C-term that's been borrowed from the shipping industry describes a method to package an application so it can be run, with its dependencies, isolated from other processes? This method helps avoid problems caused by OS differences and any other underlying hardware incompatibilities.
Answer: Container
- The fun-to-say acronym CRUD reps what four basic operations of persistent storage? Oh, and please give your answer in the order of the letters.
Answer: Create, read, update, and delete
- For some reason, it wasn't until 2016 that Tim Berners-Lee won the Association for Computing Machinery's top "Nobel-level" award, named for what British mathematician and computer scientist?
Answer: Alan Turing
- What “S” regional database management system, developed by D. Richard Hipp, is contained in a C library? Its logo is a feather.
Answer: SQLite
- Mostly famous for its "Notebook" product, what is the name of the open-source community and project taking its name as a combination (in some order) of three core programming languages: R, Julia, and Python?
Answer: Jupyter
- What “S” German company, co-founded in 2007 by Tim Kroger in Hamburg, offers market and consumer data tracking? Their logo is an S-shaped curve across a dark background.
Answer: Statista
- Which term applies to a query that’s written as text in the language of your database?
Answer: Native
- Which data rule is simply defined as: “All that is needed is there, and all that is there is needed?”
Answer: Minimal
- What geometric shape comes after “online analytic processing (OLAP)” to refer to a multidimensional data array? (Hint: You’d put “hyper” before it if there are more than 3 dimensions)
Answer: Cube
- With the same name as a confectionery company, which tech company founded in 2018 boasts a completely remote workforce?
Answer: Starburst
- Which UK data company, with name containing an extinct animal, was founded by Bruce Durling and assists with data aimed at helping young people?
Answer: Mastodon C
- What term is a language-level unit of meaning that is relevant in natural language processing and full-text search contexts?
Answer: Lexeme
- Based in Boston, Massachusetts and founded in 2017, what IT company which involves databases has an animal for a name?
Answer: Jellyfish
- What term is given to the ability to copy the changes each transaction made to the database from the master database to one or more slave databases so that exact copies of the master database are always available on the slaves?
Answer: Mirroring
- What term is given to a portion of a DBMS that is included within the process space of an application program?
Answer: Runtime
- The DBMS product now called RDM Server used to be called what name beginning with V?
Answer: Velocis
- ACID, the acronym for the properties maintained by standard database management systems, stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and what?
Answer: Durability
- What word beginning with is the property of a transaction that guarantees that either all or none of the changes made by the transaction are written to the database?
Answer: Atomicity
- In 1995, David Axmark, Allan Larsson, and Michael Widenius launched an open-sourced relational database management system (RDBMS) that is based on structured query language. What is it commonly called?
Answer: MySQL
- What “A” software is open-source provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool? It was originally authored by Michael DeHaan and given a stable release in July 2021.
Answer: Ansible
- Unicode, the standard for character encoding used to represent multilingual text as binary, is the successor of what US encoding standard?
Answer: ASCII
- What is the three-letter acronym for the programming language in Microsoft Excel in which users can write macros and other pieces of code that can perform tasks awkward or impossible to perform within the confines of the spreadsheet?
Answer: VBA
- Also known as a "mutex," an old school computing operation that restricts access to super important code sections is known by what really old school flag code communication method?
Answer: Semaphore
- What term is given to an operation in which the rows of one table are related to the rows of another through common column values?
Answer: Join
- What is the name of the convention is a type of addressing that refers to the order of data stored in memory, where the least significant bit is first stored at address 0, and subsequent bits are stored incrementally?
Answer: Little-Endian
- Which discontinued spreadsheet program, originally written by Jonathan Sachs, peaked in popularity in the late 1980s after its release in January 1983? This spreadsheet program was the first computer software to use television consumer advertising.
Answer: Lotus 1-2-3
- A groundbreaking achievement in medicine the BCGD is a database documenting the genes for which disease?
Answer: Breast cancer
- Multidimensional data warehouse model analogy: Contained fact and data tables are to star schema, as contained fact, dimension, and sub-dimension tables are to what precious, unique data schema?
Answer: Snowflake
- What "buggy" database company raised $160 million in early 2021? The company claims to combine "the benefits of familiar, relational SQL" with the "easy scale and global reach" of NoSQL.
Answer: Cockroach Labs
- Which C-term refers to a bite-sized (or rather, “byte-sized”) block of data that is used to spot errors that may have cropped up as the data was transmitted or stored?
Answer: Checksum
- What is the three-letter initialism for the markup language that was first formally spec'd by the World Wide Web Consortium in 1998 and is designed with goals of simplicity, generality, and usability across the internet?
Answer: XML
- What is the name of the 2012-founded San Francisco-based company that uses a spreadsheet-database hybrid in which features of a database are applied to a spreadsheet? Founded by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas, the company widely shares its API for connecting other online services and has raised more than $300 million in funding (as of early 2021).
Answer: Airtable
- Which database analytics software company has been in the game since 1979 and has a name that will make you think of ~1 trillion bytes?
Answer: Teradata
- What type of binary search structure is named after its inventors, Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis?
Answer: AVL Tree
- Nuts to von Neumann: Computer architecture featuring separate storage and signal pathways for instructions and data is named for what Ivy League school?
Answer: Harvard
- What kind of architecture in distributed computing is characterized by all nodes being independent and therefore, not using the same memory or other resources?
Answer: Shared Nothing
- What term beginning with R is an operation that discards all of the changes made by all INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements that have been executed since the most recently started transaction?
Answer: Rollback
- Which culinary term applies to data that’s been “prepared” (for example, extracted and organized)? (Hint: It’s the opposite of “raw” data).
Answer: Cooked
- Written in Python and used as an open-source workflow management platform, what is the name of the "ventilated" Apache-managed project started at Airbnb in 2014 and designed under the "configuration as code" principle?
Answer: Airflow
- It’s not necessarily “red,” but what type of code might “wave” to alert you that a value is missing from your table?
Answer: Flag
- What process is used to handle redundant data in storage—either by pointing it the original block or deleting it?
Answer: Deduplication
- What “P” software and database company was founded in 2014 by Navin Chaddha, and is owned by Pure Storage? Its name is a compound word of a parking place for boats and a unit of physical effort with an “x” at the end.
Answer: Portworx
- What three-letter adjective is put in front of the word "backup" to describe a backup of a database system while it is actively in use?
Answer: Hot
- Named after the computer scientist who coined the term, whose list of 12 rules of relational databases actually has 13 “commandments” because they’re numbered zero to 12?
Answer: Codd
- What sort of data type is one that which are specifically optimized for storage of geographic coordinate-based data?
Answer: Geospatial
- Weirdly, the original version of SQL developed at IBM was known by what six-letter acronym?
Answer: SEQUEL
- What “E” New York based research company, founded in 1996 by Geoff Ramsey, offers subscribers insights and trends in digital media and commerce? Its name sounds like the electronic version of a person who promotes something.
Answer: Emarketer
- Which high-performance relational database management system developed by Netherlands-based Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica lets you combine hundreds or rows and millions of columns in a table and shares a name with a famous artist?
Answer: Monetdb
- What term is given to a specific method in which messages are formulated, formatted, and passed between computers in a network?
Answer: Protocol
- Like coming up with a blueprint to show how a house will be laid out, which term describes the standards that determine how data is collected, organized, and stored?
Answer: Architecture
- Which type of computer database supports storage of all data types, with specific attributes and methods for each individual item of data?
Answer: Object-oriented database
- What “G” database company, formed out of San Francisco in 2017, uses machine intelligence to build a database of knowledge? Its name makes it sound like it's made out of yellow-like Chemical Element Number 79.
Answer: Golden
- What kind of join is formed by two tables when the values of two columns with the exact same attribute name and data types are equal?
Answer: Natural
- What database company and website, known for its Pro accounts and currently an Amazon subsidiary, began in earnest when British programmer posted a searchable list of 10,000 items in 1990?
Answer: Internet Movie Database
- Recognized as the first ever database in the early 1960’s, the Integrated Data Store was designed by a man named Charles. What was his last name?
Answer: Bachman
- Founded in 2010, what database company has a five-letter name that also means a special talent or skill?
Answer: Knack
- Frequently used in graph databases, what query language designed by Marko A. Rodriguez shares its name with a mythical monster who wives are called “Fifinellas” by British author Roald Dahl?
Answer: Gremlin
- What is the term given to a value in a collection that has a special meaning, such as 999 to mean “age unknown”?
Answer: Sentinel Value
- The H-Store system is considered one of the most prominent examples in the class of parallel database management systems, which are typically known by what six-letter name?
Answer: NewSQL
- Which term describes the characteristics of entities in a database and can include composite, simple/atomic, and single-value?
Answer: Attributes
- Which type of JOIN combines columns with the exact same name and data types?
Answer: Natural
- What “I” company, founded in Los Angeles in 1971, offers global analysis on thousands of different industries? Their name is a compound word that sounds like a planet full of long-legged wading birds.
Answer: Ibisworld
- What sort of computing is an architecture that distributes computing, storage, and networking closer to users, and anywhere along the Cloud-to-Thing continuum?
Answer: Fog Computing
- Which U.S. company that deals with databases was started by George Fraser and Taylor Brown in 2012, and is based in Denver?
Answer: Fivetran
- In 1961, Charles Bachman developed the first computer database management system. What company did Bachman work for?
Answer: General Electric
- What four-letter S term refers to a copy of a product or any of its components, installed on a single machine?
Answer: Seat
- From a name which in Latin means “first principles”, what technology company was founded by Sheryl Handler in 1995?
Answer: Ab Initio
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About the Author
Eli Robinson is the Chief Trivia Officer at Water Cooler Trivia. He was once in a Bruce Springsteen cover band called F Street Band.
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