• vsamantha35 (7/3/2014)


    Hi Experts,

    I need some guidance on this.

    Recently I have attended a job interview for sql server database administration and was asked to speak about one of the critical issue you have faced as a dba. I have explained of one of the issue I had faced in my environment. I spoke of database was suspect and I was able to recover from backups and I have explained the root cause of the issue stating that it was disk issue which caused the problem and told that we replaced the disk and we are able to restore the tlog backups + taillog backup and I was able to bring the database online.

    I don't know why the interviewer wasn't impressed with the answer.

    I want to know from exceptional dba's, normally when they ask such questions, what kind of answers or scenarios are they looking for ?

    Appreciate your inputs.

    I agree with what much of the folks have said on this thread. I'll add that it may have been a good indication that you probably didn't want to work at such a place after all. Interviewers who aren't impressed with something but don't ask followup questions during the interview to find out more tend to be idea-checkvalves not interested in the ways other people do things. At the very least, they should have asked more about what "we" meant and what your actual participation was.

    For this particular problem, the interviewer was probably looking for a more esoteric answer about how the system automatically switched over to the clustered mirror, etc, yadda-yadda, and couldn't make himself understand that not everyone has such things and that you did a great job of recovering the database.

    As for getting feedback from such an interview, forget about it and don't let it bug you. In most cases, it's just not going to happen unless you and the interviewer have a prior agreement that such post-interview dialog will occur. Just send them a card saying thanks for the time they spent on the interview and setup for the next interview... at a different company. 😉

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)