The document provides guidance on common questions that may be asked in a job interview and recommends practicing answers to be well prepared. It includes examples of responses to questions about past experience managing people, failures, difficult tasks, overcoming problems, and helping employers. Sample answers are provided for questions about the applicant's goals, background, challenges the company may face, and examples of demonstrating initiative and teamwork. The document advises tailoring answers to highlight skills and experience relevant to the employer's needs.

1. How many people have you managed
A time when you failed to be successful
A difficult task you have ever undertaken to be successful
Difficult problem you have had to overcome to be successful
How have you helped your employers
Getting The Job Outline for the Interview
https://www.pugetsound.jobs/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetails_css.jsp?postingId=141934
Your Goal is
Educate the employer on the value you bring.
Identify ways you can partner with them to achieve their goals.
Common Q&A in a job interview
I recommend that you practice answering each question with a friend over and over until the answer come
smoothly and with a relaxed but confident way.
Elevator speech
I have been an Oracle professional for many years and have saved my employers many millions of dollars,
shortened their development time, and increased security on a database and enterprise level.
I have been a DBA in production, QA, and Development environments; and have also designed databases and
managed DBA teams for the White House 2 times, and several fortune 100 corporations.
I have experience leading teams and collaborating with them to document responsibility scope, team product
delivery to customers, team measurable critical success factors, and responsibility matrixes.
I am also skilled at data governance, data quality assurance, and data retention life cycle management.
I understand The University of Puget Sound needs a DBA to Support and assist the development team in design,
development, testing, tuning, and implementation of database applications;
What challenges do you think need to be overcome during the next 3 months?
Tell me about yourself
This questions is really: What skills and knowledge do you have that can help me with my needs?
Use what you have learned about the company, their customers, products, and the job description to think of ways
your skills can help solve challenges the company has.
========
I spent my entire career in database administration loving the challengers of staying on top of all the latest
technical advances for designing, building, and maintaining databases that protect the enterprises data
information assets. Although I have always loved this type of technical work, I discovered early on that I
enjoy the strategic elements of managing enterprise data assets even more.

2. I have always been extremely organized and I have discovered that my ability to envision and organize
complex tasks has been crucial to my success. This ability coupled with another ability to recognize and
understand the roles and responsibilities related to achieving the objectives at hand has often resulted in
being tasked by management to collaborate with them on management issues in addition to technical
issues.
In the past I have collaborated with management and staff to define:
Team and project documents
• Migration Factory Staffing Plan
• Team scope of responsibility
• DBA team entrance and exit criteria
• DBA roles and responsibilities
• Team Responsibility Assignment Matrix
• Server provisioning process
• Server provisioning project plan
• On call and support DBA rotation responsibilities
• Vendor/Contractor management
• Collaborative disaster prevention and recovery plans
Technical documents:
• Development database environment standards and best practices.
• Database Design standards and best practices.
• Criteria for ensuring Database Quality.
• Processes for Ensuring business rule criteria are met on a database level.
• Database Backup and recovery procedures.
My managers have written reference letter stating that I "save tens of millions of dollars", "XXX", "XXX"
I can bring the same level of commitment organization and structure to your development project to
ensure that you achieve XXX
Here are four completely different statements about myself that I used to connect with the employers needs.
========
1. I have been an Oracle professional for many years and have worked at the White House 2 times and
several fortune 100 corporations. I have been a DBA in production, QA, and Development
environments; have also designed many OLTP and OLAP databases, and managed several DBA teams.
2. I am a dedicated and energetic professional with extensive experience working as a development DBA,
data modeler, database architect, database QA analyst, SQL and PL/SQL programmer, and production
DBA.
3. I have managed databases in several Unix and Windows environments and am good at both shell
scripting and batch file development.

3. 4. I am a data governance professional with experience as a data steward, data owner, and data
architect. I have designed data retention life cycle, data quality dash boards, and designed data
governance database repositories.
Next time you’re faced with the dreaded, “Tell me about yourself…” question, try these:
5. “Can I show you, instead of tell you?” Then, pull something out of your pocket that represents who
you are. Who could resist this answer? Who could forget this answer?
6. “The quotation I live my life by is…” Proves that personal development is an essential part of your
growth plan. Also shows your ability to motivate yourself.
7. “My passion is…” People don’t care what you do – people care who you are. And what you’re
passionate about is who you are. Plus, passion unearths enthusiasm.
8. “When I was seven years old, I always wanted to be…” An answer like this shows that you’ve been
preparing for this job your whole life, not just the night before.
9. “People who know me best say that I’m…” This response offers insight into your own level of self-
awareness.
10. “I can summarize who I am in three words.” Grabs their attention immediately. Demonstrates your
ability to be concise, creative and compelling.

4. Behavioral based interview questions.
The employer is trying to find out:
• Your problem solving process (STAR -- Situation, Task, Action, Results)
• What kind of Team Player you are
• Your definition of difficult
• How organized and methodical you are
Your story should be one that:
• Puts you in a tough position
• You analyzed and discussed the problem
• You reached a conclusion
• You were successful
• It was a win/win situation for the company
You need to:
• Define the problem, the expected outcome, and possible solutions
• Talk about the Culture, Structure, & Mission priorities
• Talk about the people you had to work with & what was expected of them
• How you tied it all together to read the goal
• It does not halve to be a problem you caused and you are may not have played the leading role in real
life, but you need to cast yourself as the star in the story.
Describe a time you demonstrated initiative
Situation
I worked for Kent School District. When they were testing the fire alarm system the power was accidently cut to
the server room, the UPS'e kicked in and all of the servers did an emergency shutdown.
Task
We needed to bring the servers & databases back up and 2 of servers would not re-start.
Action
I worked 34 hours without sleep to get all the databases back up and running. I worked with the Systems
Administrators to recover the servers and re-build the databases. This required 34 hours without sleep.
Results
• The system returned to normal functionality.
• We had a plastic cover and large red sign placed over the fil=re alrm swich in the server room.
• We implemented better backup and recovery processes and standards.
• We practiced server and database recovery 2 times a year.
• KSD purchased some small servers for the System administrators and database administrators to use as
sand boxes to do proof of concept work, learn new skills sets, and practice server and database recovery
on.

5. Describe a time when you worked with a team to solve a
problem
Situation
I worked for Boeing on a project to move 1,400 databases from data centers all over the US to 3 data centers in
PHX, STL, and Seattle within the next 6 months; and then another 13,200 databases within the next 4 years.
Task
• The project was stalling because everyone was doing everything. This resulted in people duplicating work,
changing the kind of work they were expected to do, a lot of confusion over who was supposed do
different kinds of work, and not getting some of the most important work done in the timeframe expected.
Action
After suggesting to management we needed to define team roles and responsibilities, the manager and I
collaborated with the team to define who our customers are, what the team deliverables were, and what each
person's role and level of responsibility was in delivery of our products.
Results
The team was much happier, each person's knew exactly what was expected of them, they has a small scope of
responsibility which enabled them to become very efficient at their work, The team increased the number of
database migrated over 300% in 4 weeks time.
NOTE: This was the largest migration of databases in the history of the world with over 14,000 database scheduled
to migrate over a 4 year period.
Describe a difficult problem you faced & how you dealt with it
Situation
I was hired as an Oracle DBA supporting a team that was developing software (called Entune) that enables a
Toyota automobile to communicate to a smart phone. http://www.toyota.com/entune/what-is-entune/
Task
2 weeks after I was hired the database designer was fired. He was also my supervisor. There were some serious
design issued with the database that prevented the development team from implementing application critical
functionality.
Action
After Jeff left the company I immediately talked to the team and management to identify the design issues with
the database. I installed a free trial version of Erwin and reverse engineered the database. Created database design
proposals (ERD's) and vetted those with the development team and application manager. Then I wrote the DDL
code and implemented the changes in the database. This was a massive database change resulting from a shift in
the basic design philosophy from an application that runs in the automobile & smart phone, to a platform that
supports applications.
Results
In a few short weeks we were able to deliver the first application of its kind in the world to Toyota enabling an
automobile to communicate to a smart phone.

6. NOTE: Entune was the first software ever developed in the world that enables a smart phone to communicate to a
car. The database had to incorporate REAL TIME database response times. It was designed as a platform that
supported smart phone applications, not as an application in of itself. This enables new smart phone apps to be
installed quickly and in-expensively.
What makes me different (How can you fulfill my needs in a unique way):
A deep understanding of database design for OLTP & VLDB (Very Large Data Base), Real Time, and WWW
applications.
How my skills can be used for this company (Why should I hire you):
I can assist Nordstrom with Data Governance, Data Quality, data architectures (logical and physical),
supporting development teams, providing DBA services in Dev and Production environments
What career plans do you have over the next 5 years
(do your career goals fit with this company long term).
• DBA for the next 1 or 2 years (Learn RAC, Golden Gate, Web Logic), then DBA team lead, and onward
and upward to new challenges ;)
• I am tiered of contracting. I want to find a place that I can settle into and support for the long term.
Tell me "why do you want to work for this company" (how much do
you want to work for MY COMPANY)
Nordstrom's is a company that has a divers business environment that spans over 115 department stores and
is one of the leaders in the retail fashion industry. Helping a company like this in-directly helps thousands of
people that rely on it every day in many different ways. The most valuable legacy we can leave is a legacy of
changing other people's lives in a positive way.
can you tell a little something about ...

7. The top 3 points you want to make sure you get across.
Production DBA
1. Attitude: Pro-active vigilance, data protection, and database availability defense and fortification.
2. Have authored Vendor standards that include database architectural evaluations, support, upgrading
applications to current Oracle releases, vendor access to systems etc.
3. Backing up and recovering very large database
4. Migration of databases to new servers
5. Maintenance of archive redo log destinations
6. Growth of data in the database
7. Disk backup staging areas
8. Archiving old or stale data
Quality Assurance DBA
1. Attitude: Insure Accuracy, functionality, and corporate initiative goals are met.
2. Have performed database health check auditing and database quality evaluations:
• Detect unauthorized database intruders
• Prevent unauthorized data access
• Satisfy application functionality
• Interface with other application databases
• Scale
• Can be enhanced easily and inexpensively
• Can be maintained easily and inexpensively
• Fault root cause identification
• Achieve acceptable performance
• Data integrity
DEV DBA
1. Attitude: Customer service oriented and data governance.
2. Providing reports on database changes
3. Producing ERD diagrams
4. Tuning SQL and PL/SQL
5. Advising on database architecture issues
6. Participating in code reviews
7. Maintaining database standards
8. Technical evaluation and code reviews

8. Company related questions:
1. What do you love most about working hear?
2. Tell me about the most successful person you have hired in the last year? What makes them
successful?
3. Tell me about someone who hasn't worked out so well hear? What did they do wrong? What could
they have done differently?
4. How do you expect the company's customers, products, or culture to change over the next 5 years?
Database related questions:
1. Are your databases designed to use schema and tables structures to enforce security?
2. Are you using Data Guard to help prevent system failures such as the one Authorize.net? experienced
for 7 hours due to a fire in their data center?
3. Are you using RAC technology as a part of your disaster prevention strategy?
4. Do you have any partitioned tables in your database?
5. What versions of Oracle are you using?
6. What operating systems are you running oracle on?
Questions to ask at the beginning of the interview
I have a number of accomplishments I'd like to tell you about, but I want to make the best
use of our time together and talk directly to your needs. To help me do, that, could you
answer a few questions to help focus this meeting on your needs?
5. What are the number 1 and 2 priorities for this job?
6. What is the biggest challenge you need help to overcome during the next 3 months?
7. What business initiatives will be impacting IT and/or the database in the next 24 months?
Questions to ask during the interview
1. What plans do you have for future use of Oracle, Data Modeling, SOA, BI, data Warehousing?
2. Do you have standards for data architecture, coding (SQL, C#, PL/SQL Etc.)
3. Do you have an SDLC process for moving enhancements into production.
4. Do you have a Change Management Board?
5. What is the difference between Testing for application functionality and Quality Assurance?
Questions to ask at the end of the interview
1. If there was anything about my experience or background that you wish you could change to make me
a better fit for this job, what would it be?
2. What do you think qualifies me the most for this position?
3. Do you still have more people to interview?
4. What will be the next step in the process?
5. When do you expect to make a decision
6. Do you mind if I fallow up with you in 1 week?

9. My Strengths:
1. Combination Production, development, and QA DBA
2. Data Modeler
3. Database Designer
4. Hardworking
I am extremely dedicated to my employers success and to my career. I am always ready, able, and
willing to work long hours to achieve success.
5. Self Motivated and Determined
I don't need to be pushed to work. Instead I am attempt to predict what my manager needs and be
ready to provide it in advance of being asked.
6. Success Oriented and Natural Leader
• You must be able to lead yourself before you can lead others. Be committed to your
commitments! Leading oneself requires and demands that you hold yourself accountable and be
prepared to stretch beyond your "perceived" limits!
• I believe in Leading from where I am. A person does not require a "title" or “permission” to be a
leader. Take initiative with pro-active intent. Be a fanatic about detail and quality. Do such a
GREAT job that you inspire others to emulate you and ask for your help or advice.
• Team Player
No man is an island. And in today’s world, like never before, a person requires a group of people
with whom to succeed.
• Volunteer to help others in every way you can think of. Take pride in the success of others that you
have helped. The most valuable legacy you can leave is a legacy of changing other people's lives in
a positive way.
• Connect people, teams, projects, and companies; with other people, teams, projects, and
companies. Help people provide help to other people, teams, projects, and companies. Be a
facilitator of teamwork and collaboration.
• Always look for a way that you can contribute to a group or a person more than you receive from
that entity.
7. Intelligence and Self Confidence
Being intelligent does not mean being the only person in the room who can drive a plane, but a person
who has the simple logic and practical knowledge that goes with running a proper team.
My Weaknesses:
1. RAC, Streams
2. Sometimes I pay too much attention to detail when it may not be needed.
3. Sometimes I spend too much time working and neglect my family. I need to balance
dedication to the job with dedication to my family and try not to spend more than 50 hours
a week at work.

10. Gap in work
Used the time to:
Recruited a team of 6 IT professionals to build a computer lab at home.
We:
1. Installed a physical Linux CENTOS server with 6 Virtual servers using Oracle enterprise
Linux.
2. Increased skill sets in Data Guard and Enterprise manager.
3. Installed and used Enterprise Manager Grid repository with Agents on 2 virtual servers
hosting Oracle databases.
4. Installed Windows XP professional 64 bit with Oracle databases on 2 servers.
5. Installed Data Guarded databases on windows and Linux servers.
I am at YOUR service!
Ken Hughes
Expect Excellence -- Oracle Certified Professional
Phone:
H:253-859-7771
C:206-310-8547
Hugheskc@yahoo.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/hugheskc
Copyright (C) 2009 Ken Hughes hugheskc@yahoo.com