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What third party database tools are your favorites?
If somebody’s been doing database administration long enough to claim the title Senior DBA, they’ve built up a little wish list of database management tools they’ve seen along the way. Tool types might include:
Data modeling
Change management
Backup compression
Performance monitoring
Alerting
If they had a $X tool budget for their workstation, how would they spend it? Forget corporate standards – We want to know what tools they’d use if they could pick on their own. We are not asking what software they’ve had experience using, because they might work somewhere so cheap that they’re restricted to native tools only. They have to have at least seen some ads for products that looked cool, though.
We might follow up with questions about tools we were using in-house already by saying things like, “We’re currently using Product X for monitoring. Have you seen it? What’d you think of it?”
This does two things: it gives me an outside opinion about other tools out there that our DBAs could be using to do a better job, and it tells us how much the job candidate has seen.
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