I have a generic question about the "technical interviews" we as DBA
often have to go through to get a posting (I'm a consultant) or
position: When interviewed by another DBA, do you ever feel that your
answers should be tailored by the knowledge/myths of the DBA
interviewing? For example, I got asked just last week during one of
these interviews if "a full table scan is bad?". An "ordinary" DBA
would answer "yes" right away. But anyone either doing some research
on the topic on internet or trying different scenarios himself knows
that the answer is "it depends!" (it seems to me that this is the
answer to most of the intelligent Oracle-related questions). Some more
examples of tricky questions I had to answer include "how often should
we rebuild indexes?" (the correct answer is that some indexes should
never be rebuilt, but try to explain that to someone who rebuilds ALL
the indexes religeously every 3 months) or "How much bigger would you
make the buffer pool if the hit ratio was only 80%?". It seems that I
could go on and talk about each of these questions for half an hour
easily. I went successfully through that interview, but it's only
because I played the role of a DBA who follows the myths. Had I
answered honestly to the questions, I'm sure he would have thought
"what a freak!", and I would never have heard of them again!
Daniel
Received on Mon May 26 2003 - 14:43:46 CDT
