Re: Interview type Question

"raja" <dextersunil_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:3c92eef8-2469-4473-87f3-4f9b763e1a52_at_p25g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
> Hi,
>
> I am learning Oracle, my PM asked me the following question, Please
> help me on this :
>
> You are a new employee at the company and the only Oracle DBA.
> You were just informed by the management that one of the Oracle
> Database Server is performing very badly for about a week now and that
> immediate analysis should be conducted.
> You are not familiar with the applications or the databases yet, but
> they ask you to find the problem as soon as possible.
>
> Please detail your plan of action, tools that you will use along the
> process, what would you check and how would you continue if you did
> not find any issue at the level or resource you are checking.
>
> Please explain things in a high level along with assumptions and
> recommendations.
>
>
> Please give me ur step-by-step level to proceed for the above
> scenario.
>
> Thanks in Advance.
> With Regards,
> Raja.
>
>

Who is ur?

I can't provide you with a step by step. The process tree has too many branches. The question does not give enough detail to answer. I would start by asking a ton of questions and not assuming anything. Probably the first question is What is bad? How bad? What aspect of the system is bad? Are you getting the wrong behavior or is the behavoir slow? How fast does it have to be? What specific behavior is bad? Draw me a picture of your system identifying all the parts and connections. (2 tier , 3 tier N tier) How did you conclude the database was the root cause of the problem?

You have to identify what is taking so long. Your question should evoke a series of questions from the interviewie. You must be able to answer them for the interview to continue or it will be quickly clear that you aren't competent to interview the applicant.

We found problem solving in interviews a great tool. You had to make sure you knew what the problem was so you could intelligently answer the questions.
Jim Received on Wed Sep 24 2008 - 23:19:56 CDT