Hi all,

Recently, I had the opportunity to have 4 set of work scenario interview
questions ... I cannot post the questions as the interview itself requires
to import some data into one of your existing database that will be used in
the course of the interview .... I am sure I did fairly well, not too smart
or dumb with my answers, sort of in the middle ... I can send the questions
and the export dump for anyone who are curious about it as I cannot post it
in this forum 'coz all emails with file attachment, especially 2MB in size
will be surely terminated by the robot ...

It was a good interview though, and I like the way it was handled 'coz I was
allowed to use the web and docs just as one would normally do when faced
with rael porblems at work. I actually hope that all certification exams,
especially Bill Gates' sponsored one will be like this, not dependent on
someone's memory ... I was given the answers as well to some of them and
also what other candidate's answer are ... I didn't do too well on the
PL/SQL well compare to one of the candidates who uses MERGE, how often will
DBA use a function like that ... :-)

Anyway, one of the questions is with STATSPACK, I was told to install
STATSPACK and have it do a snapshot every 15 minutes up to 12 midnight but
every 2 hours from 12AM - 6AM, so what I understand from this is to run a
snap from 0600 - 0000 at 15 minutes intervals and then from 0000 - 0600 at 2
hours intervals .... well that is how I interpreted what the exercise wanted


My question is would anyone of you use DBMS_JOB to schedule this or use
crontab? The exercise didn't specify what to use and I opted to use crontab
itself, writing one simple script that execute a snap at the intervals as I
ve mentioned above.

However, after I've submitted my answer, I suddenly question myself if there
is such a thing as stopping a STATSPACK snapshot, i.e., is there such a
thing as starting and stopping a snap or not? The script that I wrote only
does a snap and does not do a stop before doing a snap, am I right and am
just delirious 'coz the interview started from 0230 ....

Oh well, I hope to get everyone's input ... please if you don't mind ...


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