Re: DBA and certification questions?

My general take on companies that want to test during an interview is I walk out on them. Nothing worse than being asked to remember some jack assed syntax whenever you're trying to figure out if you want to work for these guys. Having been a DBA for several years (but only 1 year with Oracle) if you can't figure out I can do the job based upon keeping 24x7 operations up at prior jobs then you're not worth my time to interview with. Certification together with experience would be a plus. I'll ask fundamental questions to do with relational theory (define referrential integrity, entity integrity, primary keys, candidate keys) and maybe ask them to look over an ERD. Other than that try checking that they've actually done what they say they've done. And contrary to popular opinion I have not found web site db's to be more taxing than traditional data processing systems. Trust me, if you're running a financial system and the system bombs you're going to get a lot more attention than if the web site doesn't respond at 2AM.

Just my 2 cents.
Rich Mycroft

"gdas" <gdas1NOgdSPAM_at_yahoo.com.invalid> wrote in message news:14794d2a.7beed976_at_usw-ex0102-015.remarq.com...
> This question is to all the oracle experts out there: If you
> had to hire an Oracle DBA, what would you be looking for?
>
> I've been playing the role of a DBA at my current company. I
> have worked with oracle for almost 10 years, however from the
> vantage point of an application developer, so my areas of
> competence are in things like datamodeling, pl/sql, oci etc...
>
> Right now, I've been doing both jobs, but I have no experience
> in all the back end things that most dba's should have
> competencies in like storage and index management, backup,
> replication, tuning, etc, etc...
>
> We're on the verge of getting budget approval to bring in real
> DBA and I'll be responsible for hiring this person.
>
> My first priority is look for experience first, regardless of
> certification... Should my next criteria be certification? Is
> certification that important?
>
> Also, (I know nothing about the certification process), when you
> get certified, are you certified for a specific version of
> Oracle on a specific Platform?? I would think that someone who
> was certified and only worked with Oracle 7.3 on NT may not be
> ideally suited to working with Oracle 8.1 on Solaris etc...am I
> right?
>
> Also is certification just one "catch-all" acomplishment? In
> other words, can your certification be focused in a particular
> area (like OLTP, or datawarehousing etc...???)
>
> If there are any pointers that anyone wishes to share (things to
> look for, questions to ask), I'd be much obliged.
>
> Is it common to have someone take an oracle test during an
> interview? I'm considering pulling out specific questions from
> the DBA study book and having the applicant complete this test.
> Does anyone have any good scenario questions I might want to
> focus on?
>
> Our business is web based (when we go live...probably 6 months
> down the road) and is going to run with an oracle backend
> database server...so this is a very critical hire.
>
> Thanks,
> Gavin
>
>
>
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Received on Thu Jul 20 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT