Me DBA, Me Smart!

Well, I took part in a phone screening today. I was called by a company that needs a guy with Oracle experience. I figured I knew the basics: stored procedures, tablespaces, rollback segments, etc., so there shouldn’t be much to worry about. I certainly didn’t expect questions such as, “What does a ORA-3113 error mean?” This was followed quickly by “What are some specific Oracle supplied PL/SQL packages you may have used in stored procedures?” I didn’t anticipate pinpoint questions concerning esoteric database structures and errors. All I have to say is I got pwn3d.

Which makes me wonder. I’ve seen job postings that mention Oracle for a long time. None of them appear to be Junior positions. How do they expect anyone to magically have 5-years of Oracle experience, without any beginning jobs using Oracle? I don’t see the relation. I have over five years of generic database theory experience that I could abstract to basically any software, given enough time to learn the specifics, and I have previous experience with Oracle to build upon. Yet I was tossed around like a rag doll simply because I couldn’t launch an hour-long diatribe on the hex code for an Oracle rowid suspended in a rollback operation during PIT recovery. Obviously they were looking for a drop-in replacement for a fairly advanced existing position, but that seems to be what everyone expects. How exactly, does a person relatively new to Oracle, break into the Oracle DBA market?

I guess that’s a question for another day.

Until Tomorrow