Re: Oracle DBA Interview Questions

From: Tim Gorman <tim_at_evdbt.com>
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2016 07:13:10 -0700
Message-ID: <56DEDDF6.9010702_at_evdbt.com>

My personal favorite is "/What is the difference between redo and undo?/". Not since the 2nd Amendment have so few words produced so much speculation and misunderstanding.

But yes, more backup/recovery questions, along with some practical ones like "/Users are receiving errors indicating block-level corruption. What do you do first?/" Handled right, this could spawn a revealing discussion about RTO, RPO, and choosing recovery strategies.

With such concentration on encryption, you can end up hiring a one-hit wonder who has never been a actual DBA, or worse, turning away a brilliant DBA who doesn't yet have TDE in their work history. It's not that the questions are too difficult, but questions with a single answer able to be googled don't reveal how the person thinks.

Still on the data security theme, how about something like, "/Does TDE protect data from being intercepted on the network?/" with some follow-ups on ASO, perhaps? Focus to the core concept (i.e. protecting data at rest, protecting data in flight, etc) before focusing on proving actual prior usage?

How about more core concepts of data security, such as, "/What does 'PII' mean?/" or "/What if someone steals a full set of backup tapes?/" or "/Does cloning a production TDE database to non-production dev/test systems ensure that unauthorized administrators, developers, and testers cannot view the PII within, yet still do their job(s)?/" with gradually more detailed questions about the mechanisms to resolve it?

Hope this helps...

On 3/8/16 05:53, rob_at_oraclewizard.com wrote:
> A big part of this project is locking down a lot of sentive
> information that has been gathered over the past several decades. So
> we are looking for 4 good senior DBAs to help us upgrade a lot of 9i -
> 11g databases to 12c then, ASO, audit vault, db firewall etc. So the
> DBAs we bring in need to understand ASO. I'm still working on the
> audit vault, db firewall, Upgrade questions. -Rob
> ===================================
>
> Robert P. Lockard Oracle ACE
>
> President Oraclewizard.com, Inc.
> "When given the choice between two evils, I always take the one I have
> not tried." Mae West
> (cell) 571.276.4790
> (office) 410.766.6960
> (fax) 410.766.0332
> twitter _at_navonpilot
> youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/n4281k
> blog: http://www.oraclewizard.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> *From:* Howard Latham [mailto:howard.latham_at_gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Tuesday, March 8, 2016 07:48 AM
> *To:* rob_at_oraclewizard.com
> *Cc:* 'ORACLE-L'
> *Subject:* Re: Oracle DBA Interview Questions
>
> If you are a big user of encryption then fill yer boots! But many
> sites dont use it! Why so many encryption questions?
>
>
> --
> Howard A. Latham
>
>

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Received on Tue Mar 08 2016 - 15:13:10 CET