Advice for database related interview

[LumbergTech]

I am going to soon participate in an interview that will focus on Database related material.

I am curious what topics might be the best to study in relation to this.

I know the obvious like knowing SQL in general, knowing your joins, knowing about normalization and its nuances (when it is actually needed, and when it isn't) .

What kinds of other things would be good to focus on to try to minimize the possibility of being caught off guard?

 

[quakefiend420]

indexing, performance tuning, hardware best practices(ldf and mdf on separate spindles sort of stuff)

 

[quakefiend420]

might want to brush up on locks and locking hints too

 

[N4g4rok]

Know anything about the specific DBMS they are using? If you do, It would be helpful to look up types of backups and when/how often you should do them. The last DBA interview i had asked some of questions about what types of backups to use on databases of varying volatility.

 

[LumbergTech]

Thanks for the info guys, I will put it to use. the databases most commonly used there are SQL Server I believe.

 

[KB]

Often times when they talk about databases they also mean SQL Reporting and Analaysis Services. Even if they don't, they are still good things to know about.

If they are looking for a database administrator, I would know about high-availability strategies like mirroring (sync/async), log shipping, clustering.

 

[Markbnj]

Since you mention that the DBMS of choice is SQL Server make sure you're up to speed on the toolset, i.e. Management Studio, Profiler, Integration Services. You should know how to use the tools to create and manage users, logins, databases, tables, and other objects. You should know how to use Profiler to debug requests from clients, how to import/export various types of data (flat files, spreadsheets, databases) using integration services, that sort of thing.

 

[KentState]

Brush up on high availability options, common table expressions, functions/stored procs, T-SQL, why cursors can be bad, index types, common perfmon counters, security objects, isolation levels, common query hints, OLAP/OLTP differences, connection strings and so on.

 

[GSquadron]

Maybe they will ask about RDBMS which is quite interesting