Re: DBA interviews

From: Rachel Carmichael <wisernet100_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:25:31 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <20040821002531.9645.qmail@web60709.mail.yahoo.com>

Question 2 -- intimidation. yep. that's definitely someone I want to work for, someone who tries to bully me on an interview. Yep.

I can top your 3.5 hour interview.... I interviewed at one company where I was there from 9am until 4pm, saw 11 people. Even lunch was part of the interview, I talked with HR. We ranged from detailed DBA work to design to network/system administration to management theory.

This is an interesting subject as most of the people at my company have been offered the "opportunity" to opt-in to a voluntary severance program. If I do so, I could be interviewing again. Soon. I'd likely fail your interview.

We've done this subject before, I'll repeat what I've said. I don't really care if you have memorized syntax. If you get the ordering of the "group by" "order by" and "having" clauses wrong I don't really care, I presume you are capable of figuring out what you've done wrong and looking it up in the docs. I don't write enough SQL myself to not have to refer back to the SQL Reference manual on occasion.

I ask:

Tell me your worst nightmare. What went wrong, how could you have prevented it and how did you resolve it.
Tell me the thing you are most proud of. It could be the solution to the above problem, it could be a really cool way of extracting data, it could be the award you won for a presentation. Of course, if it's for a presentation, I'm gonna ask you to tell me all about the presentation.
How do you learn? Do you read the docs only? Do you have Oracle on your PC at home and play with it? Are you on any email lists? What books are on your shelves at home or in the office.

I seem to recall hearing Connor talk about that interview of "draw me the Oracle database and instance" and then go further and further into depth. It could have been Tom as well or instead, my memory could be faulty, it was a while ago and I pay attention to what both of them say.

ryan gaffuri <ryan.gaffuri_at_comcast.net> wrote:

> Another thread got me to think that this might be a good topic. What
> types
> of questions do you ask for a senior level position? Most interviews
> I have
> had have been really easy. I had one that was 3.5 hours, but it was
> just
> hours of the same stuff... not real hard. Most of the 'tricky' stuff
> are
> picky little syntax things that I think are silly. I have seen some
> interviews posted on the web where they ask tremendous numbers of
> really
> detailed questions on all sorts of topics.
>
> The three questions I always ask no matter what are the following:
>
> 1. Select, from,where, group by, having, order by: What order are
> these
> processed in? Then I go into the implications. I'm basically looking
> to see
> if the person understands the set based nature of SQL.
>
> 2. The following is a really tricky counter-intuitive SQL question,
> that I
> have never seen in practice(got it out of an academic textbook. Its
> really
> simple to do in relational algebra) Don't them use Oracle either. I
> want
> them to do it on a white board(mainly for intimidation, I want to get
> rid of
> people who give up real quick). I don't expect people to get it most
> of the
> time. I just want to see how hard you try. Most people won't even
> give it a
> good try. There are two solutions.
>
> You have 3 tables. Saliors, BoatsXSailors, Boats. This is a many to
> many
> relationship. Assume the keys are Sailor_id, salXBoat_id, Boat_id.
> Find all
> the sailors that have used all the boats.
>
> I ask other stuff depending on what I am looking for, but I always
> like to
> ask those.
>
> 3. Got this one off asktom. Draw me a picture of the Oracle database
> including all background process, memory structures, and file
> systems. Then
> I ask about interactions. I don't want it memorized, but I want big
> picture
> knowledge about redo, undo, etc...
>
> I ask other stuff depending on what I am looking for. What do you
> ask? What
> traits are you looking for? I'm sure some of you have really hard
> interviews...
>
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Received on Fri Aug 20 2004 - 19:21:14 CDT