You raise a good point about interviewing via trivia questions but I think you'd have to agree that for someone to know a subject there is an inherent amount of information that a person needs to know.
What that line is can be fuzzy.
Consider C, what is the difference between the stack and the heap? yes you can look this up but if a candidate doesn't know this cold then they just can't write C code properly.
Simiarly for sql if a candidate can't write a simple join then it's pretty obvious that they haven't really used sql before.
The sql questions asked here are somewhere around the fizzbuzz level of skill. Any sql user should be able to answer them given a properly setup dev environment.
What that line is can be fuzzy.
Consider C, what is the difference between the stack and the heap? yes you can look this up but if a candidate doesn't know this cold then they just can't write C code properly.
Simiarly for sql if a candidate can't write a simple join then it's pretty obvious that they haven't really used sql before.
The sql questions asked here are somewhere around the fizzbuzz level of skill. Any sql user should be able to answer them given a properly setup dev environment.