Re: Case study for interviewing Oracle DBA
- From: david wendelken <davewendelken@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 15:46:06 -0500 (GMT-05:00)
>...junior dba...
You expect a *junior* dba to actually know something?
Gosh.
I've never seen one like that.
Rarely seen a *senior* dba at a client site that knew more than I did - and I'm
not a well-trained dba by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not even a
trained dba. I'm just a developer that's picked up stuff out of necessity and
by osmosis - an educated layman if you will.
If pressed (and allocating myself 5 minutes max to do it!), here's where I
would start:
a) Ask them to sketch out their backup strategy for your company.
Things to watch out for:
1) They don't take the time to verify the necessary service levels before
planning it.
(Consider whether to include the hardware you have, or check to see if they
ask.)
2) Their backup strategy won't work for technical reasons.
3) They never plan to verify that the backups are working and that a re-install
would work.
4) They don't know why they picked the strategy they did (other than that's the
only one they know).
b) Hand them a diagram of a data model with up to 20 tables in it, with keys
and indexes attached.
Ask them to sketch out how they would distribute the tables and indexes on the
disk and in the tablespaces.
Make it imminently suitable for partitioning, but don't mention partitioning.
Things to watch out for:
1) They don't ask the right questions - volumes of data, volatility of data,
etc. - so they don't make workable choices.
c) Ask them when they would partition something, create a view instead, or
create a snapshot (oops - materialized view), and why?
d) Ask them what dbms_jobs is for and when/why they would use it.
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