Thanks GSquared!

The explainations are helpful. I knew the ACID stuff and I looked it up before hand to make sure I had each letter noted as to what it stood for. He didn't really ask me much about ACID but I was just using that as an example for things I do day to day.

They do have an OLTP system. However the position is not for "administration". Its an 80% development position but for some reason they wanted to focus on DBA type questions just to see if their candidates were well rounded I think? The recruiter told me that they definately want strong developers but they are looking for someone that is really interested in the whole picture and who would be able to identify performance problems and raise issues.

I think he really liked one answer I gave when he asked me how I would handle a server with a CPU that was running at 100%. I happened to have directly dealt with this at my last company and was able to really go in depth with how we troubleshooted it and resolved it. I also explained that I am a very hands on developer and I don't like to just write my little stored procedure and send it out into the universe... I wanna know how things are performing, if my jobs are running, index statistics and everything and I said that I'm used to a world where I script everything and nothing happens in the production server unless I have scripted it out that way. He said yes that is exactly how they operate as well. The developers script everything that gets released into production and they have another team that actually handles all of their production support stuff. And I went into some performance stuff on tables and queries ... explained how I physically partitioned a 650 gig table and all the fancy index trending I did with it and made it more efficient... I do much better when I can give real world examples of how I handle things than answering test questions.

The recruiter also told me that this guy is really intense and they actually said to me "I don't mean to scare you, but this will be hard!". So, I think I wouldn't be so nervous and anxious about it if they hadn't pumped it up so much and got me really worried about it.

Its not a huge deal and sure I'm not gonna lose sleep on it if I'm not a right fit for them... but I would really like to be in a cutting edge shop with lots of other developers that I can learn some of these things we're talking about. That and I really want to get the hell out of DC! 😀

I have been through many technical interviews and even had to endure one that was in "microsoft style". The manager had previously worked at Microsoft and he said if the type of interview was good for Microsoft it was good for this company. I was literally grilled for 2 hours by like 8 people. But that was laid back and I was cool with it cause the recruiter didn't try to freak me out. I got that job but I turned it down. 🙂