Interviewing a DBA

PASS, SQL Server, T-SQL
I'm not a fan of trivia style interview questions. Yes, I ask a few because you have to in order to immediately eliminate the completely unqualified applicants. Even those types of questions, in my opinion, need to be focused on concepts and not syntax. The reason we have the Books Online with SQL Server is because you shouldn't have to memorize every possible command along with all their parameters. Want to know how to write a MERGE query? Look it up. What does a MERGE query do? That you ought to know. I think concepts are important. Questions about the recovery models within SQL Server aren't trivia about the system, they're trying to get to your understanding of how point in time recovery works. I don't really like posting interview…
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Article Ideas, specifically on SQL Server 2008

Misc
I'm trying to come up with some ideas for an article (or six) on SQL Server 2008. I know I'm getting about 40 views a day on this blog. That must translate to about 20 users (the statistics on this site aren't clear, so I'm guessing). Do any of you have any good questions about new functionality in SQL Server 2008? I've been thinking about looking at sparse columns and filtered indexes or maybe the spatial data types. Those are the topics I'm most excited about as a database developer and designer. If I think about it in terms of being an admin, policy management, the data collector, and those types of new functionality are very interesting. I'm not even sure what's new in the BI space. So, if you're…
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LINQ and (by extension) ORM Discussion

Object Relational Mapping
Steve Jones' editorial today was questioning the use of LINQ. His focus was on the security aspects. The discussion went past that. This is a bit of circular reference since I posted over there and linked back to my ORM Concerns post below. There are a lot of interesting points being made. Some of it, from a DBA stand-point, is quite repetitive although I'd prefer to think of it as reinforcing. Steve's editorial is worth a read and the discussion is excellent.
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