“I got used to the Bourne shell for early versions of Unix.  Then I become accustomed to the Korne shell and happen to like it very much.   It has more functions than that in vi or Emac.  The interactive command line editor is so wonderful.  It has built-in environment variables which allow for a customized environment.”

Then, a follow-up question might be, what’s your experience in shell programming?  A good answer is to give a few examples about what scripts you have written to accomplish what tasks.

“Having a number of years’ experience using the shell, I have become very accustomed to shell programming.  Script writing is almost second nature and I could apply the technique to all phases of systems administration.  I have written scripts that perform automatic system backup during low CPU utilization hour.  I have written interactive scripts which help to restore files to the system, scripts which can add or remove a user from the system, and xripts for new system installation.”

These commands are specified in a specially formatted file in the ‘/usr/spool/cron/crontabs’ or ‘var/spool/cron/crontabs’ directory.  The file that executes ‘super’ user commands can be found in the root file.  Regular users may also submit jobs to ‘cron’ deamon as long as they have ‘cron’ permission.

The first step is to assign a unique internet address to the workstation.  The net-mask has to be assigned the same as other devices in that subnet.  The physical device has to be attached to the network, and the workstation connected.  When attaching the Attachment Unit Interface (AUI), you must make sure that it corresponds with the jumper setting on the unit.

Next, the system should be booted.  At this point, you should ping another workstation or server using its IP address.  If the ping works properly, the next step would be to change the /etc/hosts, /etc/netmasks, /etc/defaultdomain to include all the necessary information required by the system to recognize the network automatically upon booting.  If this system was a client or diskless workstation in an NIS network, then the ‘domainname’ command can be set appropriately or changed in /etc/defaultdomain and rebooted, which will cause it to connect to its NIS master.

The most common daemon is the cron daemon.  Here are more examples:  rpc.mountd, nfsd, mountd & biod (NFS daemons), lpd (line printer daemon), rlogind, telnetd (telnet server daemon), routed (network routing daemon), rwhod (remote who daemon).

Netstat – Shows the status of the network.
Ping – Sends packets to a destination address and tracks the performance of packets round trip.
Spray – sends packets (like ping_ but, instead of one packet, it sends a burst of packets for greater duration, putting a simulated load on a network component to better test its communications.
Ifconfig – Can be used to ascertain useful network information as well as to configure the network port.
Etherfind – gives network information about all network traffic passing through the network connection.

First Interview

1. Tell us about your experience?

2. Please your Oracle DBA experience.

3. Did you install Oracle RDBMS? in what platform?

4. What’s you CRM/Siebel experience?

5. Do you want to learn Siebel?

6. How do you work with a team?

7. How quick you learn new technologies?

8. What’s your Perl experience?

9.What’s your JavaScript experience?

10. What’s your PL/SQL experience.

11. How do you handle multiple projects?

12. What’s your experience of documentation?

13. What’s your experience of creating state government standards?

14. What’s your experience of government budgeting and finance?

15. Do you have questions for us?

16. Can you give us references?

Second Interview

1. Rate your interpersonal skills.

2. Rate your PL/SQL skills.

3. Rate your writing skills.

4. What kind of proposal did you write?

5. Rate your DBA skills.

6. What’s your experience in database performance tuning?

7. What’s your experience in data integration?

8. How confident you can learn and do Siebel?

9. What do you do after you finished a task but still have time?

10. Describe how you work in a team.

11. What’s your experience in Oracle replication?

12. Do you have questions?

Rate your skills on a 1 to 10 scale, with ten being the highest.

Note: Give a rank 8 or above all key skills and at least above 5 for all asked skills. When explain why, emphasis your experience and accomplishments in previous jobs.

1. Please rate your Interpersonal Skills. Why?

2. Please rate your Writing skills. Why?

3. Please rate your PL/SQL development skills. Why?

4. Please rate your knowledge of Oracle. Why?

5. Please rate your database design skills. Why?

6. How confident are you that you can learn an ERP and become highly skilled in it? What is your approach to learn a new software or system?

Basically tell how have you acquired new skills successful in the past. Answer with enthusiasm, give examples, say something like, “In my last job, I knew nothing about Siebel on the first day to work, but I spent a lot of time to learn the system and read all the manuals during weekend. After a week, I was able to develop new applets and business components in the system.”

7. How do you lead the effort to plan and jump-start a new IT project?

Describe the eerily phases of project management, such as analysis, build use case, documentation, don’t forget the mention that you always want to spend to time to get to know stack holders, customers, and clients and build good relationship with all parties involved in the project, and understand their needs, …

8. How do you resolve conflicts and issues when there is a disagreement among different parties involved in the project?

First analyze what is the disagreement and what’s behind it. communicate with all parties and provide an environment to let them understand each other. Have a specificaiton review, have an open discussion, there are many way to resolve conflicts and reach aggrements.

9. Based on your experience, please describe 3 factors that are the most critical to the success of an IT project?

This question has open answer. In general, to make a successful project you need to (1) have a good team to cover all functionalities through the project lifecycle, — analysis, design, development, testing, project management, IV&V, etc., (2) support and understanding from upper management, which means continuing communication with managements through the project, and (3) implementing the right technology for the project, — considering robustness of the technology, available resources for implementing the technology, and cost of ownership.

10. If you have completed all of your tasks in daily work, what would you do?

Think of what your employers expect you to do. Helps other team members, get additional tasks for the project, documentation, looking for improvements, learning new technologies, self-training, etc.

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Project Highlight

The goal of the project is to build a consolidated data system that supports high-quality government program evaluations. This system should provide an efficient, flexible, and secure means of maintaining longitudinally-linked public funded program data and promote good data management practices with respect to data systems and issues across participated agencies. This position works as the technical lead through the project.

Position Highlight

The Senior Information Systems Analyst is the expert technical specialist on the implementation of database, data access, and distribution technologies and will lead efforts involving the evaluation, implementation and maintenance of these technologies for the data integration/consolidation project. Expected skills include but are not limited to database administration with Oracle, SQL and PL/SQL programming, and data planning.

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1. With keeping this in mind please give your experience and education that you think qualifies you for this position.

This is a “Tell me about yourself” question. Using your prepared answer with emphasis on database skills.

2. What database design and data modeling experience do you have, and what tools have you used?

Talk about database design lifecycle, — analysis of business entities, data modeling, create ERD, logical database design, and physical database design. Mention big data design tools such as Oracle Designer and ERWin.

http://www.it-job-interview.com/database-design_125.html

3. What is your database administration experience in configuring Oracle or other RDBMS for OLAP and decision support system?

If you don’t have much knowledge about OLAP and DSS database in specific, just mention that the database software provides options in installation to let you setup database for OLAP/DSS purpose. Database servers like Oracle can be easily re-configured from OTAP to OLAP if necessary. Here’s a little more technical detail: OLAP and DSS database support intensive query and data retrieval, therefore, many tables need to be heavily indexed in order to achieve expected performance. For Oracle database, data files may be placed on different disks and tables may be partitioned across different tablespaces to increase concurrent access. In same cases, data may be denormalized for analytical purpose. Specific Oracle features such as bitmap index, materialized view, etc. may be implemented.

4. Please provide your experience in software programming and database development using 4GL, SQL, scripting, or general languages?

You name it, C++, Java, VB, JSP, ASP, SQL. The most important is to describe your Oracle PL/SQL experience in detail, that’s what really required for sure.

5. Describe your experience in evaluating and selecting technologies and software tools best suitable for a systems development/integration project?

Mention both technological and business considerations. Express your concerns of long term effects such as cost of ownership and resource availability.

6. What methodologies, procedures, or tools have you used for planning a data integration project?

In fact, there is no standardized methodology for data integration. Data integration project is different from software development project, but you can borrow some of software development lifecycle concept to answer this question. Quick some new data integration tools have come to the market, such as SAS DataFlux. Even if you have never used any data integration tools, you can just give your knowledge about these tools, — telling what these tools can help on the project.

7. What are your considerations on business and technical aspects if you are asked to analyze a data consolidation project which brings enterprise data from multiple business functions and platforms to a centralized RDBMS?

This is a tough one, and hard to prepare. On the business, you should talk about what’s behind the drive of data consolidation. In general, data consolidation is driven by achieving better data accuracy, data availability, and reducing data redundancy. On technical side, you need to talk about how to achieve the business goal, – it involves data analysis, planning, data modeling, architecture design, data conversion, etc.

8. Do you have any experience in data acquisition, data migration, and/or data mapping using either ETL (extract, transform, load) tools or customized data conversion solutions?

Easy question. If you used any ETL tool such as InforMatica, say so. Otherwise explain how you developed customized solution, i.e., Oracle SQL Loader, SQL and PL/SQL programming, batch scripting, Perl scripting, etc.

9. Describe your knowledge or experience in data warehousing lifecycle?

If you are not sure what the answer is, check this out:
http://www.it-job-interview.com/data-warehousing-lifecycle.html

10. Please describe your experience preparing written documents? Who was your audience?

Tons of. Technical specs, functional specs, tech doc, user manual, proposal, training instructions…

11. Please describe how you have worked with a team to accomplish a project?

Make sure you say you can do both. You can work independently to get the job done, you also enjoyed working with a team. You can be an effective team leader, or you can be a team member to support the synergy effort.

12. This position has a lot of responsibility and several tasks often come at you at once with all of them having high priorities. How do you deal with this type of a situation and what tools have you used to help you manage your tasks to ensure nothing gets left out?

Say you always use effective communication to resolve conflicts. Microsoft Project Manager is a good tool to mention.

As always, near the end of the interview, you’ll be asked “Do you have questions for us?” and then “Do you have last comments” . Search our website to get answers for these questions and make a last impression.

Some of questions in this interview are quite challenging, but they are equally challenging to everyone. Try your best.