Oracle FAQ Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid
HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US
 

Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Rant

RE: Rant

From: Orr, Steve <sorr_at_rightnow.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 07:18:24 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.0049DB11.20020722071824@fatcity.com>


Obviously you need to lower your standards. Maybe your test questions were culturally biased. Look at the SQLSever MySQL culture and dumb down accordingly. ;-)

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 8:58 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Ok, I need to vent a little.

Last week, I was asked to do some tech interviews over the phones for a mid level DBA position. Someone with about 2-3 years experience.

I don't consider myself a real smart DBA, nor do I think that I ask particularly tough questions. The questions that I ask potential candidates are soley based on what is on the resume. So I figure if someone has, say, hot backups or SQL tuning on their resumes, I'd expect them to be able to hold a fairly intelligent conversation about these topics. No such luck!

What really frustrated me, and what I really want to get out of my system, is that nobody that I talked to, had a real good concept of hot backups. Forget about recovery. I asked each and every candidate who claimed to have done hot backups, just give me a high level overview of how you do a hot backup. Don't care about syntax, just give me the mechanics. The answers I got were completely off base, baffling and frustrating. Some of these folks claimed to have 5 years experience!!!

'Well, we use scripts to do these, so I'm not sure how
these are done...' (But it says on your resume you've done this???)

'Oh, I take the tablespace offline, and copy the
datafile to tape...' (Unless I'm mistaken, that's not how a hot backup is done, right?)

'Well, I use the export utility, and as the backup
starts, it is written to the dump file.' (Huh? What?)

'During this time, everything is written to the redo
logs and not to the tablespace...' (You've been reading one of those books, haven't you?)

I also asked them how they'd put a tablespace in backup mode. Simple enough, right? Not one of them got it right. Not even close. Didn't have clue as to what I was talking about. Fair enough, you don't know. Well how about a simple recovery scenario. I asked every candidate how they would do an online recover of a datafile while the database was still in use. No ideas. Not even close.

I dunno, perhaps I'm spoilt by being a member of this list? Perhaps I expect every candidate to be as knowledgeable as you guys? Perhaps I'm asking too much?

Rant over. Thanks for listening.

mkb



Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com
-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
-- 
Author: mkb
  INET: mkb125_at_yahoo.com

Fat City Network Services    -- (858) 538-5051  FAX: (858) 538-5051
San Diego, California        -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists
--------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
-- 
Author: Orr, Steve
  INET: sorr_at_rightnow.com

Fat City Network Services    -- (858) 538-5051  FAX: (858) 538-5051
San Diego, California        -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists
--------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
Received on Mon Jul 22 2002 - 10:18:24 CDT

Original text of this message

HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US