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The nightmare interview:
“Database Architectures”
Don Burleson
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This is part of my
"nightmare" series of database
job interviews.
In this case I was doing a SUNY
college-equivalency evaluation for a 400-level course title
“Database Architectures”. The student, Ms. Dumass, strongly
believed that she possessed a college-level understanding of the
topic.
I started with a review of the evaluation
goals.
“The Database Architecture has the
prerequisites of Calculus, statistics, algorithms and data
structures, and even though I don’t see them on your transcript,
I’ll move ahead covering the topics of the database architectures
course.
Let’s start by naming the database
architectures, in the order that they were created”.
(The correct answer
is flat-files/BDAM (ISAM), Hierarchical databases (IMS), CODASYL
Network architecture (IDMS), relational (Oracle) and object-oriented
(Ontos)).
“Wait a minute”,
Dumass said “Let me tell you about my experience. We have four
system where I work and I know every screen in the whole database
architecture. I know all the function keys and where to go to get
any report in the system”.
“What type of database do you have?”, I asked.
“It’s a financials database and
manufacturing system”
“No, no”, I mean what database product? Is it
a relational database?”
“That’s a really dumb
question” Dumass said. “I’ve been working with database
architectures for 15 years and I’m here to tell ya that nobody cares
who made the product”.
“Er, OK” I persevered. “In the Database
Architecture class the students learn about relational, network and
OO databases. Tell me about them”.
“That’s all crap”
Dumass said, now getting quite angry that I would question here
obvious knowledge. “A network is a network, and a database is a
database. There’s no such thing as a Network database”, Dumass
lectured to me. “If I were you I’d try to get my money back from
whatever school you went to”.
When I informed her that she was only an
end-user of a database architecture and did not appear to meet the
requirements, Ms. Dumass went ballistic, hurling insults and
epaulets about why her use of the system were college-level
learning.
Stories like these and other tips for the IT
manager can be found in the book "Conducting the Programmer Job
Interview" ($9.95) by Rampant TechPress:
http://www.rampant-books.com/book_2004_1_job_programmer.htm
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