Database Administration Flashcards
7 cards from real CTE practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Database Administration flashcards as text
A telecom company migrates its subscriber database to the cloud. Which database design consideration is MOST critical for cost optimization in a cloud environment?
Answer: Implement data lifecycle policies to tier old CDR data to cheaper storage classes
Data lifecycle management tiers infrequently accessed data (e.g., aged CDRs) to lower-cost storage, significantly reducing cloud database costs.
In a multi-tenant telecom BSS database, which approach BEST isolates data between different MVNO clients sharing the same infrastructure?
Answer: Both A and B are acceptable approaches depending on isolation requirements
Separate databases provide the strongest isolation while shared schema with row-level security offers better resource utilization — both are valid depending on regulatory and contractual requirements.
What is the purpose of connection pooling in a high-volume telecom application database architecture?
Answer: To reuse existing database connections rather than creating new ones for each request, reducing overhead
Connection pooling maintains a pool of reusable connections, eliminating the high overhead of establishing new TCP and authentication handshakes for each query.
A telecom regulatory audit requires that all changes to subscriber billing records be tracked. Which database feature provides an automated audit trail?
Answer: Database triggers or temporal tables that log changes with timestamps and user identity
Triggers or temporal/system-versioned tables automatically capture before/after values, timestamps, and user context for every DML operation on billing records.
Which performance metric indicates that a telecom database is experiencing I/O bottlenecks rather than CPU bottlenecks?
Answer: High disk I/O wait times with low CPU utilization
High disk I/O wait times with idle CPUs indicate queries are waiting on storage reads/writes, pointing to disk throughput or latency as the limiting factor.
In telecom database administration, what is 'sharding' and when is it typically applied?
Answer: Horizontally partitioning data across multiple database servers to distribute load beyond single-server capacity
Sharding distributes rows across multiple servers based on a shard key, enabling horizontal scale-out when data volume or throughput exceeds single-node limits.
A telecom DBA must restore a corrupted table in a production database with minimal impact. Which approach is MOST appropriate?
Answer: Restore only the affected table or tablespace using granular restore from backup, then apply transaction logs
Granular table-level restore combined with transaction log replay minimizes downtime by recovering only the affected object rather than the entire database.