The answer comes in a number of parts :- 1) this book - 'Ace the Technical Interview - Database Edition', published in March, 2000 (ISBN: 0071352406) gives you the story from the interviewee's perspective but will therefore provide some useful insights. 2) Check out this Page for an idea of the sort of characteristics you are looking for :- http://www.databaseanswers.com/what_is_a_dba.html You are looking for someone whose orientation is towards technical matters rather than people. The DBA often has to play a regulatory or 'police' type role and it's sometimes difficult to be a popular team member under those conditions. 3) Ask 'What is a typical day in your job, and which parts do you like the most and the least ?' Check this page for some possible answers :- http://www.databaseanswers.com/a_day_in_the_life.html 4) Ask 'How would you identify the bottlenecks in Database performance ?' The answer is to examine the Oracle Execution Plan, and to make sure that the appropriate Indexes exist and are used by the Oracle Optimizer. 5) Ask 'How do you find the numbert of rows in a Table ?' A bad answer is count them (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table_name) A good answer is :- 'By generating SQL to ANALYZE TABLE table_name COUNT STATISTICS by querying Oracle System Catalogues (e.g. USER_TABLES or ALL_TABLES). The best answer is to refer to the utility which Oracle released which makes it unnecessary to do ANALYZE TABLE for each Table individually. 6) How much database size does the Oracle recommend that one should have, and is this the default ? 7) What is the largest and smallest sizes of databases you have worked upon? 8) What errors did you hit during your most recent database recovery, and how did you solve them ? 9) What are third-party tools have you used in your DBA career, and what would you recommend ? 10) What was the most dificult technical obstacle you encountered during the last tweleve months ?