Re: Interview Question

For whatever its worth, these are questions that I've found quite useful during the technical part of an ORACLE DBA interview:

Junior positions:
1a. How would you identify and kill an ORACLE session?

1b. If the database cannot be bounced, how would you kill a user?

2. Describe how you would add a user to the database, and what security

   considerations would you take into account.

Intermediate positions:
1. Describe your philosophy on backup/recovery/fail-over, and your

   criteria for choosing an appropriate methodology for any given    environment.

2. Discuss your philosophy on user and data security, particularly with

   respect to schemas and database links.

3. Discuss the distinction between a DBA and developer's role, with

   respect to capabilities, privileges, quality assurance.

Senior positions:
1. Describe reasonable paradigms that you feel should be implemented

   for DB object creation with respect to initial sizing, growth,    naming, etc.

2. Describe in a general sense your philosophy with respect to

   distributed applications (as opposed to client/server).

3. Describe where you feel use of the Spatial Option would be of benefit

   or harm in an application.

4. How would you kill a user session, when the only information available

   is the client machine's IP address?

Note that with only a few exceptions, these tend to be open-ended questions. I generally want to see the breadth of knowledge and experience, far more than the depth ... depth is usually visible in the experience portion of the CV.

Bill Received on Thu Jun 12 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT