RE: DBA interviews

From: Anthony Molinaro <amolinaro_at_wgen.net>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 18:13:18 -0400
Message-ID: <D17DB304A9F42B4787B68861F9DAE61CD0FFB8@wgdc02.wgenhq.net>

Ryan,
  I find juijitsu very useful, or any submission style wrestling really.   Sometimes, just a regular "one on one", ie, I take my best shot at him(or her), he takes his best shot at me.   (only punches to the jaw, no low blows mind you).   If I go down first, well, he's got the job. If he goes down first, he's gone. simple as that.=20
  As seraph (from matrix 2) would say, "you don't really know someone until you fight them".
  Yeah, get it out of the way in the interviews, that's best.

  select sailor_id
    from sailor s, boatxsailors bxs, boats b    where s.sailor_id =3D bxs.sailor_id
     and bxs.boat_id =3D b.boat_id
   group by sailor_id
   having count(*) =3D (select count(*) from boats);

Btw, are you in ny?

-----Original Message-----

From: ryan gaffuri [mailto:ryan.gaffuri_at_comcast.net]=20 Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 5:46 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: DBA interviews

Another thread got me to think that this might be a good topic. What types of questions do you ask for a senior level position? Most interviews I have had have been really easy. I had one that was 3.5 hours, but it was just hours of the same stuff... not real hard. Most of the 'tricky' stuff are picky little syntax things that I think are silly. I have seen some interviews posted on the web where they ask tremendous numbers of really detailed questions on all sorts of topics.

The three questions I always ask no matter what are the following:

Select, from,where, group by, having, order by: What order are these processed in? Then I go into the implications. I'm basically looking to see if the person understands the set based nature of SQL.
The following is a really tricky counter-intuitive SQL question, that I have never seen in practice(got it out of an academic textbook. Its really simple to do in relational algebra) Don't them use Oracle either. I want them to do it on a white board(mainly for intimidation, I want to get rid of people who give up real quick). I don't expect people to get it most of the time. I just want to see how hard you try. Most people won't even give it a good try. There are two solutions.

You have 3 tables. Saliors, BoatsXSailors, Boats. This is a many to many relationship. Assume the keys are Sailor_id, salXBoat_id, Boat_id. Find all the sailors that have used all the boats.

I ask other stuff depending on what I am looking for, but I always like to ask those.

3. Got this one off asktom. Draw me a picture of the Oracle database including all background process, memory structures, and file systems. Then I ask about interactions. I don't want it memorized, but I want big picture knowledge about redo, undo, etc...

I ask other stuff depending on what I am looking for. What do you ask? What traits are you looking for? I'm sure some of you have really hard interviews...

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Received on Fri Aug 20 2004 - 17:09:00 CDT