Data and Database Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Correct answer: All of the above.

Administrative security is broader than passwords. It covers authentication policies, physical access to the rooms where the systems are, and the terms of external agreements - including how quickly a supplier must respond. A database is only as secure as the weakest of these.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

Backups held only on the site they protect are destroyed with it, so offsite storage is precisely what makes a disaster recovery plan a disaster recovery plan rather than a failure recovery plan. Shipping copies to another location, physically or electronically, is a core requirement.

Answer: D

Correct answer: All of the above.

Data may be unavailable for any of the three reasons: it may be lost or inaccurate, the server may be down, or the database may be off-line for planned maintenance. Availability is a matter of the whole system, not of the data alone, which is why maintenance windows are themselves an availability cost.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Deadlock

Locking prevents interference but creates the possibility of deadlock - each transaction waiting for a lock another holds, in a circle. The system must therefore detect deadlocks and break them by rolling a transaction back, which is the price paid for the safety locking gives.

Answer: B

Correct answer: True

Insiders already have access, already know where the valuable data is, and are not stopped by the perimeter defences aimed at outsiders. The threat need not be malicious either - carelessness by an authorised user does a great deal of the damage - which is why access control, separation of duties and audit trails matter as much as the firewall.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Undertaken as an ongoing part of managing a database

Performance tuning is continuous, not a one-off at installation. Data volumes grow, the mix of queries changes, indexes that once helped become a burden on updates - so a database that was well tuned last year may not be now. Monitoring and adjustment are part of ordinary administration.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

Data administration owns the enterprise data model and the standards; database administration owns the physical design, tuning and operation. Both are design responsibilities rather than merely operational ones, which is why the roles sit alongside development rather than beneath it.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

This is the principle underlying data administration. Data is an organisational asset, so no department owns the database it happens to have created, and definitions, standards and access rights are set centrally. Departmental ownership is exactly what produces the fragmented, inconsistent systems that integration projects then have to reconcile.

Answer: A

Correct answer: To ensure data integrity when updates occur to the database in a multiuser environment

Concurrency control exists because several users may update at once. Reads alone cannot corrupt anything, and with a single user there is no interleaving to control - so it is the combination of updates and multiple users that creates the problem.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

Confidentiality failures do not only expose personal data; they expose costings, designs, customer lists and plans, any of which a competitor can act on. The damage is commercial as well as legal, and it is one reason security is treated as a business responsibility rather than a purely technical one.