Interview Questions From Database Pros

so in this webcast what I'm going to be doing is going through interview questions that folks submitted on the blog and then I'm gonna have y'all give the answers that you would give if someone asked you will kick off with the first one from Rob Sewell one of the folks behind DBA tools dot IO and of course with Rob being very focused on production type issues Rob asks a very production e question it's 3:00 a.m. and production is down what do you do now for those of you who who don't manage production servers it's totally ok I would expect you not to answer this question but for those of you who do tell me what's the first place that you reach for when someone calls in and says the website is down because it says the database is not responding or the data warehouse nightly jobs aren't responding what's the first thing that you go and do and look and reach for let's see what your answers are over and chat there as you fill those in it's really funny how this used to work it's I'm gonna be glad to see Kendra in here because girls tell it to story about how Kendra and I used to deal with that Damon says his monitoring tool I like that and check to see what the dashboard of it says that's also one of the reasons why I'm such a huge fan of having monitoring tools I know that a lot of people say they want to rewrite their own scripts to kind of show off but third-party tools do so much good to help you figure things out Kendra says can I connect to first off can I connect to the instance I love that too because I never want to believe what anybody else says I service status I love that just to see if the service is even up and running and of course you can check things like service status from your own desktop too depending on how you're connected to the domain a man says at the beginning I will have a lot of alerts on my email this is another thing that I struggle with with monitoring tools is how do I get to the root cause analysis something will break and then all of a sudden we get 3,000 emails and the next all of a sudden I have no idea what the root cause is versus what the symptoms were funny and a man says s people its first - uh yeah lots of people trying to win but win points there with you know SP who is activists people its first idea a sequel diem we win Aaron when Kendra and I were cofounders of Brenda's our unlimited one of the things that we used to do is we would actually give people a VM during the interview we'd say okay here's a VM go troubleshoot it and it was we would purposely break something about it so that we could watch their troubleshooting process and the answer wasn't to get to the right solution it was just to watch to see how their troubleshooting works and it when you're going for an interview and someone asks you this kind of question something to think about is that they may not have the tools that you're used to having some shops pride themselves on running with no tools whatsoever some shops see the value and investing in tools and so of course they'd say well yes you have any kind of monitoring tool that you want you know whatever one it is that we've standardized on and that helps a whole lot but the funniest moment when Kendra Jeremiah and I were doing one of these interviews we gave the candidate a VM for an interview and the VM was supposed to be broken and then the C drive filled up because I had messed something up and the VM was broken for yet another reason that was completely unrelated RDP first and then check the sequel server services if ID might have been locked and it gets a little trickier as you get into larger enterprises sometimes you don't have the ability to RDP in so just something to think about as your career grows forward sometimes you manage the sequel server but you're not allowed to RDP em for a while there it looked like Windows core might catch on that didn't seem to catch on so there's probably a GUI you can already be into but that also changes in the day and age of the cloud as you do things like as your sequel DB managed instances hyper scale where there's no windows OS that you can RDP into so even if you're not working in the cloud today it's just something to think about that if your first instinct is RDP that might be challenging for you a year or two from now you can totally recover just make a list of the kinds of things that you would do when you do RDP in and then figure out how you're gonna do those from your machine instead without already peeing it I don't think that there's a wrong answer to this question I I always liked it when I show an interview question I like to guide people the kinds of things that I would be looking for I don't think that there's a right or wrong answer thing here I just want to hear what people think through totally okay with all that stuff next question Lukas asks how would you feel if we asked you to work a Druce is a good opportunity for run books that's absolutely true as well I like that quite a bit um and I wouldn't expect that I wouldn't expect the employee to bring that in I would expect a company to bring that to the employee as in and there are positions that you hire so let me go pop back one slide there are positions that you hire where you expect the employee to bring the runbook in or to write the run book for the first time I would just be careful and go hey you know what this may be a situation where we as a company can say here's our run book here's the one that we use and that'll help a whole lot I love to this question from Lukas how would you feel if we asked you to work for a different relational database or with a different relational database management for a too much two month project so I did this is a little tricky though in terms of a question I don't know that I would want to pose it this way because I know if I'm asking you the interview question you'd be like I would feel great and I would be honored to work on a project like that you know it's hard to figure out how you're gonna answer that so what I might say instead is we have an opportunity to inside the company where we have another database platform if you wanted to you could do a two month project working on MongoDB as your sequel to be hyper scale you know Oracle whatever it is is this something that you'd be interested in if it was available to you and your answers are kind of funny so a manses challenge drop table says uncomfortable oh I love that Lucy I Love Lucy what is the vendor support on the different database management systems that's a great question and the thing that's kind of at the heart of what you're saying is also do I have peers who know it that's such a great answer I really love that I should cut it down um and Kendra nails it too with the follow up there Kendra says I would probably ask follow-up click clarifying questions about what the team is like it what the mentor what the goals are and this is so important when sometimes you go to take a DBA job and the rhythm the required skills list has this big laundry list of things and it's not that you'd be opting into it they're like well we had these 14 different people who each brought their pet project in and now you have to manage all of them go you know that's a very different very different answer and he says what's the problem we're trying to solve oh I love that because it might be especially with I'm assuming that's Andy Leonard there when I see a Leonard um what I love about that is I bet Andy's gonna say there might be skills that I can bring to the table he says it is there might be skills that I could bring to the table where we could solve this problem with sequel server maybe there's another way we could solve it with the tools that we already have so that's kind of nifty too the other thing that I like about that is I can imagine saying you know what are the problems that we're trying to solve because I want to know if other problems that I've solved will bring me expertise in that area there have been problems that I wanted to solve caching is a great one I wanted to solve caching problems for a really long time and if someone offered me the opportunity to work on say elastic cache or elastic search or Redis or memcached or whatever that me as a database administrator I'd say oh you're trying to solve problems of faster query response out of cache I would love to join that team that's very interesting whereas if they told me they wanted to use MongoDB for storing cleansing of text temporarily like documents I'd be like oh yes maybe maybe that's not a good fit for me Adam asks explain the difference between a view and a stored procedure let's see how y'all answer that one I just love this question explain the difference between a view and a stored procedure see what we come up with here and I love this because it it isn't really just a mental test it's a test about how do you explain things to people most folks who work with databases probably know that these two things are different but then how do you communicate that difference in a fairly short period of time like across the span of 15 30 60 seconds how do you lay out just a couple of differences between those two things let's see here select if ice as a proc can do DML operation but a view cannot actually it can you can do in inserts updates and deletes against a view you can even layer triggers on top of a view so that when you go to insert update or delete from it it performs different operations it's amazing I love where you're going though at the heart of it it's really about procs aprox changing you being used for set based operation proceeding procedures changing things but it's just funny that that's not entirely correct and the lack of type 10 dancers kind of tells you a story - it's all of a sudden we have to kind of pause and think three distinct things think things out hany says both can perform DML but i've never seen it in a view there's a value to that answer too because another thing what you could say is I just use a procedure for these kinds of things you I would use a view for these kinds of things when I hear that what I'm looking to hear from people Kendra says words are hard this is what makes interviews fun um I also like throwing things in with this early in an interview to get people to kind of pop out of the nervousness of a regular interview oh you're so you're so stressed out when you go in and start an interview for the first time I like oh so so Kendra says a view is usually something you select data from a procedure is something that you do to run different actions but it can also return data and he says personally I shy away from views Andy you and I both know that you have a lot of views part one of 346 Andy your blog should really be like called the view if there wasn't a TV show called the view that would be a great TV or blog title for you I love having stuff like this early on in the interview to kind of pop people out of their comfort zone and go don't worry you're not it's there are no right or wrong answers here just brainstorm with me and talk through it I think if I was also in a tent or a interviewer because some of y'all who are watching this are gonna reuse some of these questions as an interviewer one thing that I would say is never say someone's wrong during an interview because I don't want them to be uncomfortable I tell you what I've had those interviews where I've given a wrong answer and then 15 minutes in I lost my mind where I'm like oh my god I just realized that thing that I said about heaps versus clustered indexes I made a typo I need to go back in time and rewind it and then I'm never comfortable again for the rest of the interview so I wouldn't ever correct someone now these days in an interview I just say either just know what they said and move on okay so uh you know a view is only used with muffler bearings okay cool and then just keep right on truckin and if they say later you know oh my gosh I messed up it's okay some of this is just about hearing how we communicate together so I'm gonna stop for a second if that's thank this week's sponsor oh it's an ugly foggy morning here in San Diego oh it's kind of nasty usually is a much more fun view so I'm going to say a quick thank you to this week's sponsor so century one is doing a webcast with Kevin Kline and Denny cherry about the top five ways to keep your database applications highly available you can sign up for that totally for free over Brent Ozark comm slash go slash top five tips so let's see here next up we have Sean asks tell me something about databases that I don't already know and this sounds so cocky right the key is how you deliver it I don't want people to think I know everything so I might change his queer question just a little bit I might say tell me something about databases that fascinates you you know that you're mesmerized by and so that would be the kind of thing that I would look for is I want to find they are get someone excited about something so for y'all when you're going through and giving an answer what is something that you think most people don't know and it doesn't have to be useful it can be one of those things that you're like well just when I found this I thought it was absolutely shocking for me oh I'll tell you one of the ones that kind of blew me away was the first time that I found out yeah oh man Kendra you can name a database with an empty space yes and then there's gotchas around using multiple spaces oh I love it it's so fun Oh aim and distributed AG's that's actually a good one too Lucy says you can defrag a database yeah John thanks for the t-shirt I love Amsterdam it's absolutely beautiful it's fantastic I tend to I bring a lot of souvenirs home in the form of t-shirts but Annie's asking it hahaha and if at the last webcast so that's really good Annie there's this thing called database filler and we'll get to that too as well and so yeah this just helps people get excited and get them in the comfort zone Oh Jedi Mind gorilla says I'm amazed by how many developers we work with who've never known about or used an execution plan you know I'll tell you I have weird feelings as a database administrator I'm kind of weird like this and I know a lot of my peers get our surprise that I would voice this opinion but to me my developers if they can get data in and out of the database I'm pretty much happy it's the job of a database developer someone who purely works in development or someone who's a senior DBA or junior DBA who reads the execution plans and then coaches their developers on how to right better queries I don't expect my developers to read execution plans it would be nice if they could but I've seen how much developers have to know these days I'm gonna stop for a second I say I have so much respect for developers these days it is so incredibly hard to master everything that's involved with building and hosting a database based application it's amazing I unit testing source control continuous delivery continuous integration Python Java JavaScript all these different frameworks and the frameworks change every week so I'm kind of like developers have a really hard job and I get it and I understand if they don't use execution plans so I'm I I'm with you and that I wish that they would but I just understand why they often don't so next up let's see here what do we got here where do you go when you're looking for answers but you're not sure how to solve a problem and iliyan asks this and I'll let y'all answer in Johanna says good development takes performance into account yes but it takes performance on the client-side the browser side the the app server side the database side I can't expect a developer to know all of that and as soon as they do they're more of an architect than they are a developer ah discord and slack Wow Jedi Mind gorilla now how 20/20 of an answer is that that's amazing I love it and I've done a lot of people who are watching us don't even get where the root of that was and I absolutely love it that's fantastic Stack Overflow and get as far away from the problem as possible that's kind of cool I'm a huge bold stack overflow yeah there's there's a lot of a lot of interesting stuff inside there and your answers the answers that y'all are giving iliyan talked about in the comments of the blog post when we originally posted these iliyan said my goal is to make sure that people don't immediate we ask for their senior DBA that they don't immediately jump and escalate everything to their senior whether they know it or not print host our site well there's your first problem now you're gonna have do problems yeah so aliens I just loved how he was gauging how far people go down the road of solving their own problems before they parachute out and go ask for help and he wanted to see that people are willing to Google y'all just by being here you're already showing a measure that you're more senior than a lot of folks and that you're willing to put the time into sharpening your knives to improving your skills and you're a cut above just for that it's it's worth mentioning when you're in interviews read the source code that's good it's worth mentioning when you're in interviews that here are some of the kinds of places that I like to go proactively in order to start learning about problems even before I have them like now you're learning about interview questions before you're looking for a job although if you are looking for a job that's probably not a bad thing to say in slack II weld in here not in the chat you got to be careful because of course your employers might be watching this as well like Idris as if it's an emergency or idea more slack a friend out of all the stuff on your resume what are you the most proudest of what is the moment that you look at on your resume and I go I want to make sure that you understand that I did this so often when I'm dealing with recruiters recruiters will get employees just a keyword spam everything they're trying to get them to dump everything inside of here and not just just so that they can pass the basic keyword filters I want to make sure that whatever the attempt the the reader is really proud of or that the the applicant is really proud of is actually something that I address so that I can ask them more more follow-up questions like Kendra is proud of putting pasta in a burrito now I will say sushi burritos life-changing if you haven't had a sushi burrito before I do want to take a moment to talk about sushi burritos what sushi burritos or is it's exactly what it sounds like except this way they can use sushi that isn't necessarily the most visually beautiful because normally sushi has to be absolutely visually gorgeous it's perfectly cut here they can make it quicker then they can also put uglier stuff inside there like you know two day-old fish or whatever but it's really good and it's a good deal so if you get the chance sushi burrito can't say enough about it third-party contributions to your open source projects Oh at now so there some companies these days it's gotten trendy to ask what open source projects you commit to or what open source projects you contribute to and I don't know that that's always fair because not everyone has the time the spare time in their life to do it but if you have done it you should be extremely proud of that first implementation of a dag for a hybrid environment Aymond Wow yeah that DAGs the eggs are one of those where there's like a page and a half and books online but the actual applet inflammation takes three months Richie says little does Brent know that right now this Mexican is removing all of his AWS rights except the thing is I've never had any AWS rights Ritchie always is the boss of our AWS environment I am a babe in the woods and he gets nervous when I have any rights in the AWS environment Oh Kendra I pick an example of a team I was proud of working with that's need is an interviewer to hear too because I also then if I'm trying to sell you on the position I'm like alright let me figure out how I can make my team you're what I have what this team has in common with that team so that I can win you over because when you find the right candidate you also have to do some work to woo them into your environment so let's see here this one was interesting to me mark asked who are your favorite database authors this does imply two people have enough time to go through and spend their spare time reading stuff on databases but the fact that someone would even be able to name any like I don't even care about what that person writes about if you read any I'm like whoa holy smokes you're serious like when I first met Jeremiah pashka I was like blown away that the guy would read source code and read white papers about the source code I was like wow that's that's pretty serious Ritchie says the Postgres team did their dairyman's just trying to brown-nose their the Postgres team - there's some really interesting blogs around core database technologies inside the Postgres engine clunky says love to read vldb journal I like that - I find that really interesting even blogs that don't relate to my own technology I just find it interesting to see how other people solve those same problems Lucy says uh Brenton pin all your just brown-nosing me but pin all I'd love pin all because I know guaranteed when I see his article I'm gonna be able to copy/paste some of the T sequel code out of there and it's gonna save my rear end later so I always enjoy reading those I like Steve Jones to stiva has a lot of interesting industry takes he really is a takes a big picture calm view of the entire industry it's really neat stuff and pin all will be very happy to read that line Dave saved my da they saved my life more times than I can count yes absolutely albeit sequel performance yeah the quality on articles there is absolutely fantastic ah this question came in today writes he asked what was your biggest mistake and that this is one of those that you don't want to ask early on in the interview because it requires retrospection and it requires thinking and you have to be calm but what was your biggest mistake yeah and it did this way it kind of well coming to this interview cuz it turns out I'm not really qualified Andy how much time do you have we'll see the problem is they're all tied for number one cuz I've ruined every one of these companies that I was involved with I would also mention the team I worked with well taking this one position I tell you what it turns out it was an absolutely terrible mistake i-i select star from users your i I think for me one of the biggest mistakes that I ever made was not understanding that just because I was taking backups didn't mean they were good you know just because the backups were running successfully didn't mean that I was going to be able to do restores and I would do a restore every now and then I would do a test restore just to see if it actually worked but I didn't do it on a regular enough basis so eventually that bit me in the rear end and I wasn't able to restore something that I really wanted for a dev environment and after that I was like I need to learn how to figure out how to learn how not to trust that the backups just work I need to figure out how to automatically do your restores Greg Wow that's a great question what's currently harder for you then it should be Greg the reason why I love that question so much is it's the kind of thing that you see show up on hacker news all the time where product designers are trying to figure out what they can build to make your life easier people like me in terms of training I ask that same question when I'm working with customers what's harder for you or what mystifies you because that is a marker that it's something that I need to need to go through and rebuild and figure out how to design better training on mr. Lee I removed sa rights where I removed sa rights without assigning rights to a user and I prevented payroll from running oh yeah whoa when I was doing sa P I accidentally deleted all system printers instead of just the filtered list on my screen oh oh those are fun it also helps I think it feels like to me being honest about mistakes that I've made helps me build a bond with whoever's on the other side so I think is if you ask the question as an interviewer you should also be prepared to share some of these things yourself just to start building that bond so now it's said now it's funny with that when I do training lab vm's one of the first things I tell lab students is do not touch the network I don't think you're gonna fix anything just do not touch the net leave the network alone because I've lost track of the number of people who've gone in and tried changing something and they've locked themselves out of a machine this one's weird so Doug says how do you feel about documentation and this that's one of those that produces a rabid love-hate relationship you know either you're gonna go oh I love it because I need it as a user or you're gonna be like writing documentation makes me stab people in the face so the way I change this question a little as I said what do you look for in good documentation so y'all instead instead of answering how you feel question because I know it's gonna make people stabby especially first thing in the morning answer this one instead what do you look for in good documentation today yeah Eamonn says I love reading it and I hate writing it I know that feeling yep there's also some interesting so Andy examples Andy says examples for me that's one of the big keys with sequal Authority comm with pin all site is that I know when I read it's documentation I'm gonna find examples that I'm gonna copy paste outta there now Gerudo says not document not Microsoft because that documentation is bad I'll tell you what I will give Microsoft props because the documentation has been getting way better if you look at the the more recent stuff that they've been shipping I've been really tickled pink especially now that we can do pull requests now that it's in github but I'm with you there in that for years I couldn't trust the stuff that was in documentation it was wrong it was all kinds of stuff Lucy Lucy's lying right there of writing documentation is proof that you know something and like tests your ability to know something I tell you what that's exactly how I feel as a trainer nothing teaches me better than having to write a course on something because I keep going to write slides and I'm like I don't know that what I just said is really true maybe I should go through and document that just to make sure that I actually know it Monte asks this one and Monte was asked this question in an interview I'll let you type in your answer in here what is database filler meanwhile I'm gonna go close my window shades because I have these big floor-to-ceiling windows in here in my office and it's starting to get bright now that the sun's coming out here I go to work at the butt crack of dawn and so of course lighting gets all weird so let's see here and handy handy knows the answer to this handy was on the last webcast and he knows the answer so see if any of y'all know the answer and will give you a few no takers well this is kind of tricky it turns out montego's money said to the interviewer he's like I don't know this doesn't ring a bell it doesn't seem and some of you were like I don't actually know avoiding fragmentation it turns out that the person who is interviewing Monty was actually asking a fake topic the person asking man mani sir Monty says the person asking Monty said well you know what I was really just testing you there's no such thing as a database filler I wanted to see whether or not you would say I don't know and I was like oh that is just dirty if someone pulled that trick on me I would be very disappointed but at the same point I kind of liked it because it's really valuable as a data professional to hear someone say the magic words of I don't know what I look for in a senior is someone who immediately short-circuits and goes no I don't know the answer to that but here's where I would look with a junior a lot of junior folks are like I don't know the answer but it must be a real thing or else they wouldn't be asking me so I I better make something up I expect that out of a junior but by the time you get to senior I expect you to hit the Eska or hit the escape button kind of panic your way out of there and go no look I don't know but here's where I would go and look and here's what I would ask for I was asked what would I do if someone threw a wad of paper at you in order to figure out how I communicate so my answer to that immediately just I've never heard that before but I loved it I would immediately open the wad of paper because I would assume it was a written note of some kind or like a signal maybe that has to do with I was just watching a TV show recently Impractical Jokers where someone handed a note to someone else but that would be my first reaction is what's inside the paper you know just cuz that's kind of the way that I think weird techy tries to analyze the person who through it no I know that ever all of us who are in tech are deeply and fundamentally flawed and I don't think that I would want to analyze any of you or even myself Parker asks what's your approach to error handling oh goodness what's your approach to error handling this is kind of tricky nothing hahahaha this is good handy says yeah you know it's funny I was with Eamon for the longest time I didn't even try like and I think something like and so don't try I like that try is good but usually none snatch it out of the air and quickly try catch a lot of people don't know how to do try catch so if if the interviewed person started telling me try explaining try catch I would be dancing and clapping if I had to guess I'm just purely guessing based on the code that I see out there in the field I'm gonna say like 90% 95% of code does not have any kind of error handling in it whatsoever doesn't have a try/catch so those of you who are using try catch you should be very proud of yourselves you're above average you're doing better than most folks um and if you said none I would be okay with that as long as you were quick upfront and honest there are lots of businesses out there who've never put a try-catch line anywhere in their code they don't even do anything like that on the other hand stuff like banks sometimes they do expect very rigorous transaction handling but I kind of leave that is up to them let's go figure out what they want to do corridos says if I see code with error handling I respect that person I agree I'm with you there if I open up someone else's code that they'd written from scratch knew and it had error handling in it exercise left for the user which should give a shot out to Richey Joris on the on the webcast works for me Joris works throughout it works with me I don't know that he really sometimes he works against me well let's be honest but he has error handling like Oh be still my beating heart so good mark asks what's the latest version that you've used in production now and I tweaked his question just a little he used to say sequel server version but I just said version because some of us use things like as your sequel DB AWS RDS etc I don't think there's a wrong answer to this but what it's useful for is to find out how current your knowledge is with current technologies there's nothing wrong with working with old versions I know people who work even today only with 2008 or 2012 and that's all they have the chance to work with that doesn't mean that you suck is a person that doesn't exclude you from jobs you should be totally ok and comfortable with that some of it is a signal to enter to employers about what are what am I going to need to train you on or in the case of Lucy Lucy says sequel server 2019 and sequel server managed instances that's a sign that you may be able to teach us something that there may be something that you we need to learn from you like if we're adopting new technologies Marc followed up with out of the newer versions that you're not working with yet it's not everyone's as fancy as Lucy out of all the things that you're not working with yet are there any features that you look forward to trying I do I'd be curious about that with y'all so in the feature is out of force a sequel server 2019 managed instances etc what do you look forward to trying hany says query store I'm gonna give a quick shout out plural site has all of their courses free this month just during April so you should get your rear end over to Pluralsight comm and go watch Aaron steal Otto's course on query store just right away while you still can't get out of this crappy webcast accelerated database recovery oh what a neat technology that I found that really interesting batch mode on row store to end but an instant roll backs exactly the same as accelerated database recovery I've seen that as being a huge popular feature with with folks 20:19 big data clusters yeah as an interviewer the thing that I loved about that question is people who have an answer and I don't care what the answer is but people who have an answer are taking their own time to go and learn about new stuff and that sets you apart from other candidates just as a side note there too while we're talking about it so just as a side note oh I should dance this thing around now that it's getting all dark well I'll talk about it while I move around close the blinds so this week speaking of learning new things century one has a webcast on how to keep your database server highly available so go watch that over a brento PSICOM slash go slash top five tips you can go register for that's totally free taught by two people Kevin Kline and Danny cherry with tons of experience in our industry doing exactly that keep making sure that your database is highly available so go check that out totally free brent o--'s are calm slash go slash top five tips so back over here at OU kapil asks if we need to migrate a database with low downtime what are our options what I love about Kapil question is he doesn't say what should I use or what's the right way to do it kapil just asked what are some of the different options that you have log shipping is a great one that people don't know very often replication I might get a little nervous about because I don't know that I really want to set up replication just in order to migrate a database cuz plus to not everything is beautifully compatible with log shipping as well that can cause a few problems log shipping available software all that someone says the transition software this is OBS it's a broadcasting tool that a lot of streamers use OBS it's amazing how many of you set log shipping I if Kendra were still here Kendra dropped off in order to go to a webcast if Kendra was still here she would be her heart would be warm for y'all because both she and I have a very soft spot in our heart for log shipping I think it's one of those timeless answers that will work really well right up to get to the cloud and of course in the cloud things are a little bit trickier because in AWS RDS and in Azure a sequel TB you don't really have that option no I'm not saying it's not good anymore but I'm just kind of throwing the flag out that hey as you move more towards the cloud just be aware that some of those answers may not be an option for you next up Joe gets a little touchy-feely Joe says tell me about a time that you really struggle to collaborate with a co-worker and how you handled it tell me about a time when you struggled with a co-worker to collaborate and how you handled it Haruto says I got a approve kirito's message manually because kurodo's message got flagged by moderation crudo says I killed him I had to laughs they touch my screen okay that's pretty much unforgivable I this is that's like Blair Witch Project levels here hold on let's move some of these lights around let's get this to work now this is gonna be all freaky holy moly I love this question for a few different reasons but one of the things that's kind of a gotcha with that as database administrator this is totally Blair Witch to screw that camera this is this is one of those questions that DBAs really have to answer data professionals whether you're a database administrator a developer anything that you do inside databases data is usually the core of all kinds of things inside the business it's really central to all kinds of things inside the business so all of us are constantly interacting with other folks and not only do we have to interact with them as they're our customers or vice versa but we have to work together in order to accomplish the goal managers like to say that there are two tools there's the carrot and there's a stick if you want to get a horse to move forward you could either dangle a carrot in front of it meaning positive incentives or you could beat him on the rear end with a stick meaning negative incentives if I'm given this interview question I want to find out the code whether or not they're using the carrot and the stick because I know a lot of professional database administrators people who put the word D or put the term DBA in their title they love the stick they love to beat the daylights out of other users they say things like I wouldn't allow that my environment you can't use cursors or triggers here I lay down the law with an iron hand I'm like well that that's one tool but there should hopefully be other tools inside your arsenal let's hear about some of those other ones next up next question in here oh hold on a second here we have another one mr. Lee says working with a team at my current job we butt heads constantly because I did basis work in my previous position I call them out on their crap you know that that might be one of those times where you where you watch the carrot and the stick and sometimes people who are doing it the wrong way they just don't want to hear that they're doing it the wrong way it's really problematic for me as a consultant and you got to get good at it because you're gonna jump to other teams I'm gonna give a quick plug out here for one of my favorite blog post series I'm going to go to Google and I'm gonna go search for Brent Ozark insulting lines so I wrote this series of blog posts called consulting lines with one-liners that I use through my consulting trying to get around problem team members or get around problem situations without getting myself into too much trouble so I'm gonna copy paste that over into slack just so that y'all are into the twitch chat there too just so that you all have that as well next up so the next question Chad asks what's the aspect of databases right now that you're trying to learn what is it that you're trying to figure out okay Jedi Mind EBS is that right now this the conflict or collaboration thing is stressful because I have to push back the hard part is finding the line between data integrity and like high-performance or getting feature shipped and that never goes away it's always the case I'm learning my sequel in Postgres they suck I spend about half of my time jumping back and forth between sequel server and Postgres and and I there are things that I'm very happy to come back to sequel server 4 and I love that as an interview question 2 because you can talk about alright you say that they suck what are the parts that you say that they suck at because that also is a way of saying what sequel server is good at drop table TBL student says become better at tuning I love that because it's a timeless skill it always works Jedi says I had EWS dropped in my lap with no training so I'm still learning that as fast as I can new interesting in the day and age of the cloud topics continually change like training things continually change so fast Richie and I both you do a lot of 80lbs stuff well he does it I watch and it's really interesting to see how fast the services change how fast best practices change if you learn best practices for AWS Azure Google whatever and then six months later you go to apply the same best practice it may not be the best practice anymore it may be something completely different that's the new best practice so that's kind of terrifying I'd say next up what about you what was the worst interview question that you ever got what was an interview question that you got where you were like oh my god you know I never want to have to deal with this again or an interview question where you go it made me immediately realize I'm not good for this problem eternal dev coder says sequel server is good but it uses a lot of memory I always like to keep things in perspective in terms of what a lot is this has 64 gigs of RAM and I see people going sequel server what you're trying to put 64 gigs of ram in sequel server I'm like yeah I would like to at least have it have as much as my laptop seems like a fair thing especially when sequel server enterprises $7,000 a core one core of Enterprise Edition costs more than my laptop and I have a really nice laptop not as nice as root cheese but yes it's pretty nice the how do you feel about working nights or weekends Winnie oh oh oh oh that's tough and when I took it as a when I used to be on a default time database administrator one thing that when people would ask me stuff like that I'd be say I'm a hundred percent down with it as long as I get comp time for every hour that I work on weekends I need an hour off during the week to take care of the kind of personal errands that I would normally be doing in my weekend time or to take my wife out or spend time with my family I said I'm not asking for overtime it's not like I'm saying for every hour I work on the weekend I need two hours off during the week I think that that would be over-the-top but I'm sure it's reasonable to ask for an even swap because that way it kind of resets the perspective of I'm okay would do an extra but you also have to let me still maintain a personal life and I'm not saying that I'll know you never work more than 40 hours in a week but I just want to make sure that if you steal from my time on the weekends where I owe my loved ones things that we'll be able to work that out in the week instead and that their response to that was always super telling you know that either they would give comm time or they wouldn't and if they wouldn't give comm time I'm like this isn't a good fit for me that's not so good Kevlar says for every hour I work after hours I want three hours back during the daytime I don't think that's unfair when I was on my way up as a DBA I was just even asking for one to one because that would immediately tell me if the company was being fair or not and if they were like no that's out of the question then I was like my work here is done and if they said things like well we do you know if you work on a Saturday you get to take a week day off I'm like okay good at least we're in the similar ballpark there Lorenzo says I'm glad I live in a country with employee rights yeah you know and you got you there are their pros and cons to each of those Oh Lucy oh oh that's heartbreaking what's your family life like can you work flexible hours oh that is too terrible that's that's probably the worst way of here oh that's I feel for you on that one I would have been really nervous answering that question I think my answer would have been probably like well my wife doesn't beat me that often and when she does she usually doesn't have the knife in her hand so it doesn't hurt too bad just to see if they would drill any deeper I'm like if they did I'd be like well if you're gonna ask inappropriate questions I'm gonna give you some inappropriate answers you know when l am i my wife likes to wear the pants and she has this rubber donkey suit for me that i wear it's only on Thursdays though on Wednesdays I I'm allowed to just wear the clown suit just to see if they would go interesting and that Jedi says you guys are way more demanding than me I figure I with what they pay I agree to work 50 60 hours a week I know friends of mine who work for hedge funds who make that exact same decision friends of mine who work for hedge funds sake look I'm gonna trade this much of my life in exchange for $250,000 a year or whatever the number is and I'll tell you a story about from my own past there was a time when a company was decade ago company really wanted me bad they were like we really want you you're the person for this job you're the only one who can here we've got to have you on the team and I said well here's the deal I want a quarter million dollars a year and I'm only gonna work 40 hours a week you know that if you want me to move it was a move to a place that I had no interest in living my wife would have hated it it would have been an absolute murder just on my social life on my work-life balance all that I said I'm willing to work but you're gonna have to pay me a quarter million dollars a year to move there I want a three year minimum commitment you're gonna pay my relocation costs and at first they were like what because I don't DBAs don't make that kind of money in most circumstances and I said no here's the deal if we have to move to the this place where you're at my wife has to stop working she wouldn't have a job there she's very specialized in what she did at the time I said so you have to replace her income that's just a table steak starter and then I'm also gonna have to sell my the the house I was living in was gonna have to sell that I was gonna have to figure out how I'm gonna go move to this other place I was like whoa if you want me I'm in but I'm only gonna give you a number where I would feel happy about and hokey says I did that once and I ended up moving to Nashville when I said yes this is why it's so important to set the price right there's a great book secrets of consulting by Gerald Weinberg that talks about how you set your rates when things like this come up Gerald says set your rates at the principle of least regret you don't want to set it so high that you regret it if they say no but you also don't want to set it so low that you're disappointed if they say yes when I first got started in consulting I thought well I got to win every deal it's important to me to win every deal so I'm just gonna charge like $100 an hour for my consulting time and then people would say oh yeah I deal sign up let's we'll take all of your time that we can get and then I regretted it that they said yes because I'm like I'm working for $100 an hour and I have all these other chances but I'm kind of locked in now with this so you want to set it high enough that you're not upset if they say yes for example in the Nashville thing that one of a set in here when Hokie said you want to set your rates to the point where if they say yes you're like pack your bags or going to Nashville because everybody will be excited in order to do that you don't want to set it so low that you're like oh my god now I have to actually move to Nashville and for a blog Nashville's actually a really neat place it's kind of cool so that is the end of this week's webcast I want us to give a shot out to a century one for sponsoring this week's webcast you can go now head over to Brenda's our comm slash go slash top five tips and you can register for a totally free webcast with Kevin Kline and Danny cherry where they'll be talking about the top five tips to keep your database highly available so thanks everybody for hanging out with me this week it was a ton of fun talking to y'all as always and I'll talk to you on the next webcast the next one the next dream that I'm doing I'm gonna take my full D be a job interview Q&A it's a course that I sell online for nineteen twenty nine bucks somewhere in there and I'm just gonna do the whole live on twitch so I'm gonna step through the exact same questions that I ask during job interviews and it's way more than I asked during job interviews it's like a hundred and fifty questions altogether but I'm gonna record the whole thing so that that way y'all can have it totally for free and watch through it and see how I do interviews we'll be doing that as part of the quarantine training during May where I'm giving away all kinds of training as long as I'm still stuck in here under quarantine might as well go for it but now I'm gonna go open those blinds and go enjoy a cup of coffee with a nice rising sunrise so thanks everybody and I will see y'all later

Channel: Brent Ozar Unlimited

Views: 5,501

Rating: 4.909091 out of 5

Keywords: sqlserver, brentozarunlimited, brent ozar, mssql

Id: 4as5GV884lw

Length: 51min 34sec (3094 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020