| | Personal |
| | 1. What DBA activities did you to do today? |
| | 2. What is your typical day like? |
| | 3. What other parts of your organization do you interact with and how? |
| | 4. Do you consider yourself a development DBA or a production DBA and why? |
| | 5. Are you a nuts-n-bolts DBA or a tools-n-props DBA |
| | Technical - Oracle |
| | 1. Explain the difference between a hot backup and a cold backup and the benefits associated with each |
| | 2. You have just had to restore from backup and do not have any control files. How would you go about bringing up this database? |
| | 3. How do you switch from an init.ora file to a spfile? |
| | 4. Explain the difference between a data block, an extent and a segment. |
| | 5. Give two examples of how you might determine the structure of the table DEPT. |
| | 6. Where would you look for errors from the database engine? |
| | 7. Compare and contrast TRUNCATE and DELETE for a table. |
| | 8. Give the reasoning behind using an index. |
| | 9. Give the two types of tables involved in producing a star schema and the type of data they hold. |
| | 10. . What type of index should you use on a fact table? |
| | 11. . Give two examples of referential integrity constraints. |
| | 12. A table is classified as a parent table and you want to drop and re-create it. How would you do this without affecting the children tables? |
| | 13. Explain the difference between ARCHIVELOG mode and NOARCHIVELOG mode and the benefits and disadvantages to each. |
| | 14. What command would you use to create a backup control file? |
| | 15. Give the stages of instance startup to a usable state where normal users may access it. |
| | 16. What column differentiates the V$ views to the GV$ views and how? |
| | 17. How would you go about generating an EXPLAIN plan? |
| | 18. How would you go about increasing the buffer cache hit ratio? |
| | 19. Explain an ORA-01555 |
| | 20. Explain the difference between $ORACLE_HOME and $ORACLE_BASE. |
| | 21. How would you determine the time zone under which a database was operating? |
| | 22. Explain the use of setting GLOBAL_NAMES equal to TRUE. |
| | 23. What command would you use to encrypt a PL/SQL application? |
| | 24. Explain the difference between a FUNCTION, PROCEDURE and PACKAGE. |
| | 25. Explain the use of table functions. |
| | 26. Name three advisory statistics you can collect. |
| | 27. Where in the Oracle directory tree structure are audit traces placed? |
| | 28. Explain materialized views and how they are used. |
| | 29. When a user process fails, what background process cleans up after it? |
| | 30. What background process refreshes materialized views? |
| | 31. How would you determine what sessions are connected and what resources they are waiting for? |
| | 32. Describe what redo logs are. |
| | 33. How would you force a log switch? |
| | 34. Give two methods you could use to determine what DDL changes have been made. |
| | 35. What does coalescing a tablespace do? |
| | 36. What is the difference between a TEMPORARY tablespace and a PERMANENT tablespace? |
| | 37. Name a tablespace automatically created when you create a database. |
| | 38. When creating a user, what permissions must you grant to allow them to connect to the database? |
| | 39. How do you add a data file to a tablespace? |
| | 40. How do you resize a data file? |
| | 41. What view would you use to look at the size of a data file? |
| | 42. What view would you use to determine free space in a tablespace? |
| | 43. How would you determine who has added a row to a table? |
| | 44. How can you rebuild an index? |
| | 45. Explain what partitioning is and what its benefit is. |
| | 46. You have just compiled a PL/SQL package but got errors, how would you view the errors? |
| | 47. How can you gather statistics on a table? |
| | 48. How can you enable a trace for a session? |
| | 49. What is the difference between the SQL*Loader and IMPORT utilities? |
| | 50. Name two files used for network connection to a database. |
| | Technical - UNIX |
| | 1. How do you list the files in an UNIX directory while also showing hidden files? |
| | 2. How do you execute a UNIX command in the background? |
| | 3. What UNIX command will control the default file permissions when files are created? |
| | 4. Explain the read, write, and execute permissions on a UNIX directory. |
| | 5. What is the difference between a soft link and a hard link? |
| | 6. Give the command to display space usage on the UNIX file system. |
| | 7. Explain iostat, vmstat and netstat. |
| | 8. How would you change all occurrences of a value using VI? |
| | 9. Give two UNIX kernel parameters that effect an Oracle install |
| | 10. Briefly, how do you install Oracle software on UNIX. |
| | I hope that these interview questions were not too hard. Re |