Welcoming questions
- Can you tell us about your DBA experience and the platforms you know best?
- What is the largest or most critical database environment you have been responsible for?
Role-specific / technical competencies
- Walk us through how you diagnose a slow query, from execution plan to fix.
- Describe the backup and recovery strategy you ran in your last role. How often did you test restores?
- How have you set up high availability or replication? What failure modes did you design for?
- How do you manage database access and permissions across teams without becoming a bottleneck?
- Tell us about a version upgrade or migration you led. How did you minimize downtime and risk?
Behavioural & culture fit
- Describe a time you prevented a data loss incident that others had not noticed coming.
- How do you handle a developer who insists on a schema change you believe will cause problems at scale?
- Tell us about the most stressful production incident of your career and how you communicated during it.
Problem-solving / case
- The application team reports random query timeouts during business hours, but overnight jobs run fine. How do you investigate?
- A junior engineer ran a DELETE without a WHERE clause on a production table an hour ago. Walk us through your recovery steps.
- Your main database is at 85 percent storage capacity and growing 5 percent monthly. What options do you evaluate and how do you decide?
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