Interviewing a DBA

The Voice of the DBA

Steve Jones is the editor of SQLServerCentral.com and visits a wide variety of data related topics in his daily editorial. Steve has spent years working as a DBA and general purpose Windows administrator, primarily working with SQL Server since it was ported from Sybase in 1990. You can follow Steve on Twitter at twitter.com/way0utwest

Posted on 5 July 2005
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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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Posted by mike.williamson on 7 December 2010

I'm going to delete this comment shortly.

Posted by mike.williamson on 7 December 2010

Fantastic post!

Posted by mike.williamson on 7 December 2010

Loving the blog.

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