Interviewing a DBA

By Steve Jones, 2005/07/05

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.