Re: Interview Question

>Last summer I interviewed with a large airline firm for a dba position
>and the first technical question asked was - If you have 8 marbles all
>of the same size but one is heavier how can you find the heavy marble
>with a set of balance scales in just 2 weighings? The second question
>was - If you are in a boat on a lake with an object in the boat and you
>toss the object overboard will the lake water rise or fall? (They did
>ask a sql related question about how to join 2 tables to get an 'array
>like' output.

The real question is? Did you answer and if you answered correctly, did you get the job?

I would answer:

1. weigh 3 against 3. If they balance then weigh the remaining two against each other to find the heavier marble. If one set of three is heavier, then take 2 of those three and weigh them. If they balance, then the heavier marble is the 1 remaining, otherwise the heavier one is it.
2. rises. the weight of the object displaces more water in the boat then by itself. (this is a guess)

It so happens that I'm an independent consultant with over 10 years of Oracle experience. I have alot of experience in database admin, development, data modelling, etc. etc.  

You can find my resume at

http://www.verge-tech.com/eprofile.htm

Send me an email, or phone me if you need some temporary help on any Oracle related projects.

I can also do "hello world" in sql*plus and other Oracle tricks too.

Regards,

Ennio Murroni

p.s. here's my interview question:

Ask them how to do a select from a table whose name is in lowercase. Received on Fri Jun 13 1997 - 00:00:00 CEST