Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: D

A column in a database table represents an attribute.

Each column holds one property of the entity - name, date of birth, salary. A row is a tuple, one complete record, and the table itself is the relation.

Answer: B

The largest digit in the octal system is 7.

Octal is base 8 and uses 0 to 7. Three bits give exactly one octal digit, which is why octal was a convenient shorthand on machines with 12- or 36-bit words.

Answer: C

Data integrity means the accuracy of data.

It is the assurance that data is correct, consistent and complete over its whole life, enforced by constraints, validation rules and transactions. Security, by contrast, is about who may see or change it.

Answer: A

Adding a new facility to a system is described here as arbitration.

In bus arbitration a controller decides which device may use a shared bus at a given moment, so that new devices can be added to the same bus without conflict.

Answer: A

A direct access storage device is abbreviated DASD.

The term is IBM's, and covers any device on which a record can be reached directly rather than by reading through what precedes it - disks and drums, as opposed to tape.

Answer: C

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol.

It lets a management station query and configure routers, switches and servers, reading values from each device's management information base and receiving traps when something goes wrong.

Answer: D

One million bytes is about 1 MB.

Strictly a megabyte is \( 2^{20} = 1{,}048{,}576 \) bytes, since memory is addressed in powers of two. Disk manufacturers use the decimal million, which is why capacities appear smaller once formatted.

Answer: C

Supercomputer speed is measured in gigaflops and above.

A flop is a floating-point operation per second. The scale runs mega, giga, tera, peta and now exa: the fastest machines exceed a quintillion operations a second.

Answer: B

IP stands for Internet Protocol.

It addresses and routes packets between networks. It is connectionless and makes no guarantee of delivery; TCP above it provides the reliability.

Answer: D

Under non-preemption a resource cannot be taken from a process holding it.

It is one of the four Coffman conditions for deadlock, with mutual exclusion, hold and wait, and circular wait. All four must hold at once for deadlock, so breaking any one prevents it.