Book excerpt: As representatives from the IT community, all of us have had our own experiences of attending interviews - clearing or close to clearing and sometimes with tons of questions and doubts failing miserably. These stories are in the most pleasant or not so pleasant memories of our mind and we will assure you this book will kindle those memories for sure. We have taken tons of interviews and most of the interviews are not revolving around how deep technical and internals you know about the subject - but it revolves around how good you are with the basics.To clear an interview, one doesn't need to know inside-out of a subject, and subjects like "SQL Server" so vast that every single day we learn something new with this product, and even a complete lifetime will fly off if we keep doing this. Again, the various roles one can get into for products like SQL Server are from Database Developer, Database Modelers, Database Architect, Database Administrator and many more. Hence, this book is geared towards demystifying and a refresher for memories on the fundamentals which sometimes are the most important things to clear any type of interview for any role. Some of the concepts discussed are generic and are not tied to any specific version of SQL Server, but most of it the new features introduced with SQL Server have been included in this book.This book is not a shortcut or a sure to crack interview guide but this book gets you prepared in an organized manner. Let us also assure you this is neither a completely comprehensive guide but surely is a great starter nevertheless. Use this to guide you and be mentally prepared for the big day. When faced with this big day, we get overwhelmed and confused about where to start our preparation. And this book is just that secret recipe in your arsenal to get geared up. Sometimes these basics will help you narrow to a solution quickly when given a scenario.Now this book's flow is "Question & Answer" mode from start till the end to help you grasp the concepts faster and to the point. Once you get an understanding of concepts, then if we are twisted with the concept in a scenario it becomes easy to solve them. Most companies have a typical way to do interviews which are based on the scenario as per their environment and these are just combinations of the concepts to fit their need and SLA.Though each of these chapters is bucketed for convenience we highly recommend reading each of the sections nevertheless irrespective of the roles you might be doing as each of the sections have some interesting trivia's working with SQL Server. In the industry, the role of accidental DBA's especially with SQL Server is so common. Hence if you have performed the role of DBA for a short stink and want to brush-up your fundamentals then the respective sections will be a great skim.