mediumMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
FC0-U71 Practice Question: Refer to the exhibit
Exhibit
SELECT * FROM Employees WHERE Department = 'Sales';
Refer to the exhibit. A user runs the query but gets no results, even though there are employees in the Sales department. Which of the following is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
CompTIA often tests the subtlety that trailing whitespace in data can cause exact-match queries to fail, leading candidates to overlook data quality issues and instead suspect syntax or connectivity problems.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The Department values contain trailing spaces.
The query likely uses an exact match (e.g., WHERE Department = 'Sales'), but if the Department column contains trailing spaces (e.g., 'Sales '), the string comparison fails because SQL treats trailing spaces as significant in many databases (or the data was padded with spaces). This is a common data integrity issue where imported or manually entered data includes invisible whitespace, causing legitimate rows to be missed.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The column name is misspelled.
Why it's wrong here
The column name 'Department' is correctly spelled.
- ✗
The database is offline.
Why it's wrong here
If the database were offline, the query would not run at all.
- ✓
The Department values contain trailing spaces.
Why this is correct
Trailing spaces would make 'Sales' not match 'Sales '.
- ✗
The table name is incorrect.
Why it's wrong here
The table name is spelled correctly in the query.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every FC0-U71 question from scratch — 988 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This FC0-U71 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the FC0-U71 exam.