May 30, 2012 at 3:08 pm
David Webb-200187 (5/30/2012)
For #2, it depends. The answer you gave will verify that your backup matches your database
Doesn't even do that (unless the backup was taken with a specific option). It just verifies the backup header and a few other bits of the backup file.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
May 30, 2012 at 5:29 pm
Thanks, Gail. I learn something new every time I visit.
May 31, 2012 at 4:23 am
SKYBVI (5/30/2012)
Brandie Tarvin (5/30/2012)
SKYBVI (5/25/2012)
Hi,I have been studying SQL Server DBA interview questions from the net and find these questions in wich I am unclear of the solutions :-
1) If a database goes down for whatever reason (assume data file is corrupt) and the database cannot be brought back online (i.e. you are in a recovery situation), what must be done first to ensure you can retrieve the latest data modifications assuming the database is set to the FULL recovery model?
ans :- meanwhile connect to the log shipping server.
2) What can you do to guarantee any backup is valid?
ans :- restore verifyonly from backup
Just looking at these two questions, and the answers you've posted, I would be very very careful about just accepting these answers blindly. Question one makes particular assumptions about a business's environment setup and question two... Wow. I can count three ways (right now) that that assumption can get a person fired.
If you want to interview for a DBA position, I suggest buying a developer copy and playing with it until you break several things. Because I would not hire someone who answered those questions with those answers.
Then why there are so many links for SQL Server DBA interview questions , if ONLY practical test was the sole judgement/hiring criteria ??
Practical tests aren't the only judgment / hiring criteria. There is a lot more to getting through an interview than a cert test. Part of it is social skills. Part of it is whether or not the candidate is honest about their abilities. Part of it is past experience. The cert test only plays a part if the company wants a cert or if the person is coming from a non-IT background (like me). And a lot of interviewers will make the candidate solve real life problems to verify that they have the skills they claim to have.
Answering those questions the way you are proves to me that you don't have the RL experience I'd expect someone to have. It's one thing if you come to me saying "I only know what I learned in my home office setup." It's another thing if you're telling me you know from disaster recovery and backups and then give me THOSE answers. Because then I know you don't know what you're talking about.
EDIT: I should note that a lot of us who are involved in the hiring process are okay with the prospective employee saying the words "I don't know, but I can find out" or "I don't know, but I can learn that." No one knows everything and we expect there to be gaps, especially if it is a junior DBA position. It's someone coming in and acting like their skill level is a 9 (on a 1 to 10 scale) and only having a 1 or a 2 level ability that bothers us.
If you learn the material (do your research well) and practice it with a Dev copy of SQL, you are ahead of the game. If you are honest about what you can do and what you've only read about, you are ahead of the game. The days of faking one's way into a DBA job are pretty much over. Someone doing that might still get a job, in a one-DBA shop where they have to handle every crisis, including basic server administration. But not in a bigger environment where managers have learned to recognize the experienced from the non-experienced candidates.
May 31, 2012 at 7:42 am
Brandie Tarvin (5/31/2012)
EDIT: I should note that a lot of us who are involved in the hiring process are okay with the prospective employee saying the words "I don't know, but I can find out" or "I don't know, but I can learn that." No one knows everything and we expect there to be gaps, especially if it is a junior DBA position. It's someone coming in and acting like their skill level is a 9 (on a 1 to 10 scale) and only having a 1 or a 2 level ability that bothers us.
I'm currently interviewing for several positions. The first thing I'm looking for is if someone is trying to inflate their skill set. I would *much* rather have someone tell me what their honest experience is - and, if they don't know, respond with "I don't know, but here's the way I'd go about handling that situation to get the information I'd need" than try to pretend they know. The person with less experience but who is honest about their answers is going to go a lot further than someone who thinks that the questions I'm asking are 100% about technical skills.
More often than not, I'm interested in how they handle questions that involve working in team environments, collaborating with others on the team, researching new issues, where they draw the line between "figure it out myself" and "ask for help", and how they're going to keep me informed about what's going on.
I'm also interested in the ability to communicate clearly and effectively with me and our user community.
Technical skills can be learned far more easily than those last two.
-Ki
June 4, 2012 at 12:47 am
Some questions whcih were asked by interviewers :-
1) Why clustered index are only 1 and non clustered indexes are many?
Also, if for a table we have just non clustered indexes and no clustered index, will the performance be good or
bad ?
2) If you are backing up your databases in this way...
1 full backup daily and rest all transaction logs every half an hour daily.
and u want to restore and you notice 1 transaction log in between is damaged.
can you recover all of your data ?
3) What differences you note when u install 2005 and 2008 standard editions.
4) In log shipping, if you have a 1 tb db on primary and on secondary the drive is being getting full by logs.
What can you do( on secondary) other than increasing the disk drive space to accomodate the logs?
5) In merge replication, what will happen if there are many push updates from both publisher and subscriber at same times/ many transactions occuring at same time?
Regards,
Skybvi
Regards
Sushant Kumar
MCTS,MCP
June 4, 2012 at 4:32 am
SKYBVI (6/4/2012)
Some questions whcih were asked by interviewers :-1) Why clustered index are only 1 and non clustered indexes are many?
Also, if for a table we have just non clustered indexes and no clustered index, will the performance be good or
bad ?
2) If you are backing up your databases in this way...
1 full backup daily and rest all transaction logs every half an hour daily.
and u want to restore and you notice 1 transaction log in between is damaged.
can you recover all of your data ?
3) What differences you note when u install 2005 and 2008 standard editions.
4) In log shipping, if you have a 1 tb db on primary and on secondary the drive is being getting full by logs.
What can you do( on secondary) other than increasing the disk drive space to accomodate the logs?
5) In merge replication, what will happen if there are many push updates from both publisher and subscriber at same times/ many transactions occuring at same time?
Regards,
Skybvi
You know, all of these questions would be easily answered if you got yourself an eval or dev edition copy of SQL Server and just learned how to use SQL.
Eval copies are free.
June 4, 2012 at 5:04 am
SKYBVI (6/4/2012)
Some questions whcih were asked by interviewers :-1) Why clustered index are only 1 and non clustered indexes are many?
Also, if for a table we have just non clustered indexes and no clustered index, will the performance be good or
bad ?
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Indexing/68439/
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Indexing/68563/
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Indexing/68636/
2) If you are backing up your databases in this way...
1 full backup daily and rest all transaction logs every half an hour daily.
and u want to restore and you notice 1 transaction log in between is damaged.
can you recover all of your data ?
Try it and find out.
3) What differences you note when u install 2005 and 2008 standard editions.
Try it and find out.
If you memorise answers, you will be lost as soon as the interviewer digs into details. If you've played around and have practical experience you won't be.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
June 4, 2012 at 5:14 am
If you memorise answers, you will be lost as soon as the interviewer digs into details. If you've played around and have practical experience you won't be.
Thats true I agree, but what if I hadn't faced such issues while working...
Isn't getting knowledge abt it better than just sayin, I don't know because I hadn't faced this situation in my practical exp.
Many SQL dba questions have to be known/learnt because we never face it in real time.
Nowhere in a single company you can gain all sql dba knowledge.
Regards
Sushant Kumar
MCTS,MCP
June 4, 2012 at 5:29 am
SKYBVI (6/4/2012)
If you memorise answers, you will be lost as soon as the interviewer digs into details. If you've played around and have practical experience you won't be.
Thats true I agree, but what if I hadn't faced such issues while working...
Isn't getting knowledge abt it better than just sayin, I don't know because I hadn't faced this situation in my practical exp.
Many SQL dba questions have to be known/learnt because we never face it in real time.
Nowhere in a single company you can gain all sql dba knowledge.
No, but the questions you are asking indicate to me that you have no SQL Server experience at all. Every DBA should know about backups, whether they use them or not. Every DBA should know something about indexes, even if it isn't the full-blown details that someone like Gail knows.
If you haven't faced these issues in your personal job experience, you need to get a copy of SQL for home and go through the BOL tutorials, and read BOL, and practice the things you see.
June 4, 2012 at 5:49 am
SKYBVI (6/4/2012)
If you memorise answers, you will be lost as soon as the interviewer digs into details. If you've played around and have practical experience you won't be.
Thats true I agree, but what if I hadn't faced such issues while working...
That's what a home lab is for.
I've never implemented clustering or mirroring for a client. I've never set up log shipping. I've never had to restore a database to point-in-time. I've never had to implement peer-to-peer or merge replication. I've never implemented partitioning. I've never encrypted or compressed a database
I've done all of those at home, more than once.
With the easy of setting up virtual machines these days (even my laptop can run one), there's no reason not to have somewhere to play around with things you don't get to work with but want to get familiar with.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
June 5, 2012 at 8:21 am
SKYBVI (6/4/2012)
Isn't getting knowledge abt it better than just sayin, I don't know because I hadn't faced this situation in my practical exp.
Any quest for knowledge is admirable but you seem to be ignoring two important aspects of the way you are trying to gather knowledge.
First, you want the volunteers on this site to use their valuable time to create customized learning packages for your consumption. Several users have pointed out that the answers you seek can be found through search engines. Your preference seems to be that they go out, retrieve those answers and bring them back for you. The thing is though that the harder you work to attain knowledge, the better equipped you will be when it comes time to apply that knowledge. If someone tells me that the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose other sides are 3 & 4 will be 5, then I can echo that answer, but it only applies to one use case. If I take the time to learn the Pythagorean Theorem, then I can solve the hypotenuse for any right triangle.
Second, let's say you have a leak in your roof. There's a guy in your area who really wants to become a contractor but has no experience. So, he asks another contractor how to describe a roof repair. He then comes to you and parrots the expert's explanation. If you hire him, will he do a good job repairing your roof? Probably not. Will you be happy that you paid him to practice? Probably not. When your roof collapses and you have to pay a new contractor loads more money to do the repair right will you admire the first contractor's spunk in pursuing his craft? Probably not.
So, by all means, hunt for new knowledge. But don't cut corners; if you do, you betray both yourself and your prospective clients.
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