Being honest...I read the initial post and thought....ho hum...had a database problem and restored from the backup. Okay....that's good to know, but the interviewer said CRITICAL.

Restoring from a backup is something some places do daily. We are constantly restoring databases from prod to qa or dev (or qa to dev), or to our training server.

Now, were you on a time limit? Had you done some other checks to see if you could recover the suspect database without using a backup?

So, I can see the interviewer not being fully impressed. Now, if you had drives crash and need to be replaced, then reload SQL Server and recover your databases on a production server AND do it all in 4 hours. That might be impressive.

If you had trouble with a database server and your "pointy haired boss" told you he was an expert on clusters...and before you could stop him he deleted the Q drive (quorum drive with all the cluster stuff). Then you, with sysadmins, rebuilt the entire cluster and all databases in 3 days...that might be impressive.

But most DBAs can restore a database from backup in their sleep.

Bottom line...you told the interviewer something that was critical to you, but you didn't show what was critical about doing a basic database restore.

-SQLBill