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Interviewing a DBA

,

Andy and I had an interesting question on this today. He's trying to

hire a DBA and he had his first phone interview with a guy that

supposedly had 10 years of experience. One of the first questions was

asking about a table with 3 columns, two of which were in the clustered

index. A particular query that referenced all 3 columns had a bookmark

lookup. He asked how to make it run faster.

Now I know it's a loaded question, somewhat, and there are lots of factors, but would you answer like this?

  • Build an indexed view

And then mention that you'd need to rebuild the index every night so that changes to the underlying table would show up.

I'm sorry, but I think that either you've substantially misrepresented

yourself or your 10 years involved no problems or actual work and

mostly just holding a title.

It got us thinking about what questions to ask and how to evaluate

someone. We also discussed how you should handle an interview. I wrote

an article (Who Do You Hire?) a few years ago, but it's probably time for an update.

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