More DBA job interview questions and answers at
http://dba.fyicenter.com/Interview-Questions/
What is the most important job function for a database administrator?
This question gives you the opportunity to understand what “being a DBA” means to the candidate. If you are conducting the interview then we will assume you know that
(1) you have an idea of exactly what duties you expect the DBA to perform and
(2) that a DBA wears a lot of hats depending on the shop they came from. They may be more server and hardware focused and rarely write T-SQL. Or they could have been more on the development side and knew how to do a restore but have never racked a server in their life.
You need to know a bit more about what their practical experience has been. We are talking about hands-on experience, too. If they haven’t touched it, then it doesn’t count as experience. It counts as classroom learning, but that’s about it. And if that classroom learning didn’t have a hands-on lab it counts as listening, maybe. Once you can get an understanding of the tasks they have been doing you can also understand if their understanding of what is most important matches your expectations.
For example, the most important function would be the ability to recover data to a specified point in time.
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