April 22, 2014

Common Questions in Oracle DBA Job Interviews

Some Important routine Oracle DBA Interview Questions

“Very useful questions and proper answers of Oracle DBA HR Interviews”

Here are some common and general interview questions raised by either HR department or It recruiters.

Que: Tell us something about yourself?

Ans.: Be point to point while answering this question. Starting from your Name the candidate must cover his professional experience. Remember you talk which is relevant to the desired profile. You must give the brief idea about your academic qualification, achievements along with the career goals.

Remember that before telling anything about your interests and traits, you have already discussed and gained the information about the available position.

Que: What are your weaknesses and strengths?

Ans.: This is the most asked question during interviews. Be very positive while answering these questions and give the smart answer. Try to render a positive answer to both the questions.

While talking about your strengths describe your skills and abilities that are the most suitable for the vacant position. Such as “I don’t just follow the deadlines but try to finish the given task well before the given deadlines.”

When there is the turn to say about your weakness you have to be a bit diplomatic. Show the positive side of your weakness such as “I praise my team after every successful achievement, but then I feel that I can improve them to do better.”

Que: Why should we hire you?

Ans.: One of the most typical questions that are asked during an interview. Here you can provide some examples in the form of your expertise and past achievements. To answer this question in the best way, you should have done the homework and compare your skills with the requirement of the vacant position. The best answer to this question can be “because you have the opportunity and I have the competence to accomplish that opportunity.”

Que: Where do you see yourself in five years?

Ans.: Be focused on your career goals while answering this question. The answer of a fresher for this question can be “Once I get enough knowledge and experience, I would like to acquire a senior profile from the junior position.”

Que: Tell about your terrible/memorable experience of your career?

Ans: I was in past company and providing DBA support during the night. At that, I was alone Oracle DBA in duty with some IToperation guys. At 2:45 AM, I was monitoring all databases and same time I found something wrong with our one of the production database. Database crashed and we got physical corruption in a datafile which size was around 80 GB. Immediately I tried to call my superiors but nobody picked my phone. That time I decided to restore datafile from the last backup and started the recovery process. Before this process, I stopped my all standby databases of the production database. The recovery process took around 4 hours for extracting datafile from backup, copying, applying archive logs. But finally, production database was up. Early in the morning, I got a call from my superiors and they shocked to hear about this scenario. Next day I got appreciation but those 6 hours were really horrible for me.

These are absolutely tricky and mysterious Oracle DBA interview questions. But these questions should be addressed properly with your any of performance tuning scenario or disaster recovery scenario like above.

I have written a book named Oracle DBA Interview Questions for helping Oracle DBA community to understand how questions raised how to give proper reply with appropriate explanations. Of course, above questionnaire doesn’t include in my book because above are part of HR department only. Sometimes these kinds of queries are being raised by Oracle DBA too during the interview.