I'm still in the process of interviewing for an open DBA position in my company. As the potential candidate, you are trying to appear calm, cool, and collected but sometimes things come out that just don't make sense. Some of the best answers so far:
me: I see you've been a DBA on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. What percentage of time do you think you spend on each OS?
interviewee: About 50% on Solaris, 50% on Linux, and 50% on Windows.
me: What exactly is HP-AIX?
interviewee: It's HP's version of AIX that runs on HP-Superbowl.
me: Explain what happened on your last production recovery.
interviewee: My databases are setup so I never have to recover.
me: Oh? How is that.
interviewee: We use RAID 5.
I'll add more as I go.
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4 comments:
My favorite interview question:
Go to that whiteboard and please draw a picture of what oracle "looks like", the major memory structure, the processes, briefly describe what they do and how they interact.
You want to see fear?
I hired a DBA Fred on the spot. He didn't say much in the interview. Very quiet. Gave him the pen and he was able to draw Oracle on the board and explain it all. In detail. He was my best hire so far.
He is able to restore my databases for sure.
One that I liked is "What are some of the basic security setup that needed to be done for a default installation?"
I would expect a senior DBA to be able to talk about securing the various Oracle accounts, Oracle Net, applying latest patches, etc. More often than not, I get DBAs saying that nothing needed to be done because Oracle 9i and up, by default, locked and disabled the various Oracle accounts.
Candidate: "I manage eight distributed databases, located at facilities around the world"
Q: "What backup strategy do you use?"
Candidate: "Weekly full exports"
* Clang *
Q: What did your duties include?
A: I overlooked a team of 3 programmers.
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