Databasen - Revisited
0995a06aaeaf6b70e79c3aafd6719329 at half.pint.org.uk
Wed Oct 18 18:09:55 BST 2006
On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 12:16:00PM -0400,
the following was promulgated by Matt Sergeant:
> On 18-Oct-06, at 11:08 AM, Nigel Rantor wrote:
> >So, due to the excellent response to the first post regarding
> >interviewing DB candidates and some of the weird and wonderful
> >ideas they have I present my second, very open, question...
> >What is your favourite question to guage someone's level of
> >expertise in the database field generally, without reference to any
> >specific DB.
> >Have at it mongers...
> Q: What is wrong with the following setup:
> CREATE TABLE Month (
> id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
> name VARCHAR(16),
> shortname VARCHAR(3)
> INSERT INTO Month VALUES (1, "January", "Jan");
> There are lots of fairly obvious right answers (localisation would be
> one obvious one), but most people won't get the fact that the primary
> key index is a bad thing, because the entire table fits into a single
> page of pretty much every DB I know, so index access is actually
> slower than a full table scan.
> If they answer with that, it's an instant hire (though I've never
> given this question to anyone. 9 out of 10 DBAs wouldn't even get it,
Bonus points for them asking what on earth that table was for given that
I am struggling to think of something you can do with it you can't do in
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