Hi again…

I wanted to share with you my latest experience in interviewing for a Senior SQL Server Production (no development) DBA position in Southern California. As we all have come to learn that the “typical” process is a phone interview and then if they like you they invite you for an in person interview. Typically the phone interview is technical and the in person interview is more interaction based.

On my phone interview it was very technical and revolved around SQL Server 2005. Here are some of the questions I received:

1. What are the different versions in SQL Server 2005
2. What is the difference between RAID 0 + 1 and RAID 1 + 0
3. What is a “live” lock
4. In a heavily transacted system how would you update 1 million rows without causing
any blocking?
5. Explain the word “federated” in terms of database servers and databases.

I successfully passed the technical phone interview and I went on to the in person interview and that was more about my social interaction with the rest of their database team. I am still waiting to hear back. In my next post I will give my answers to the technical questions I received. However, I suggest you research the questions on your own and not just learn the definitions or how to do something but “why” you need to resolve the problems in the questions.