By Mike Simpson
When it comes to technology companies, Oracle has some unique claims to fame. After all, it created the world’s first autonomous database, which is a massive feat. It’s that kind of innovation that drives job seekers to this tech giant. That means candidates typically face stiff competition. If you want to stand out, then nailing the Oracle interview questions is a must.
Fortunately, it’s possible to get them right with a bit of preparation. If you’re about to face off against interview questions for Oracle, here’s what you need to know.
How to Answer Oracle Interview Questions
Before we hop into the Oracle interview questions, let’s take a second to talk about how you need to approach them.
As a large organization – with around 133,000 employees worldwide – it’s easy to assume landing a job at Oracle is easy. However, Oracle has the luxury of choice since so many candidates are interested. That’s why, if you apply, you need a solid strategy for answering interview questions for Oracle.
Precisely what that entails depends on the question type. As a technical company, Oracle will ask a lot of knowledge-based, straightforward, and traditional interview questions. With these, you usually present facts, augmenting them with details about your past experience or mentality when possible.
With behavioral and situational questions, you need a different approach. Usually, combining the STAR Method and the Tailoring Method will get you moving in the right direction. Your answers will be thorough, compelling, and relevant, making it easier to stand out.
However, you don’t want to hop right into practicing your answers. Instead, you need to make sure you can address that specific hiring manager’s needs. How do you do that? By diving into some research.
First, you want to take a hard look at the job description. See which skills and what experience Oracle is after. Along with any must-have skills list, seek out clues that are featured in other parts of the description. For example, if they describe the work environment, you can sometimes learn about traits the company wants to find.
Second, check out Oracle’s mission and values statements. Again, these clue you into the type of candidate they want, as professionals who feel a connection to those same points are often better matches for the culture.
You can also check out any Oracle social media profiles. This also includes insights that help you learn about the company’s culture, along with recent achievements that you may want to reference in some of your interview answers.
One thing that’s important to note about the Oracle job interview process is that it’s usually long. Many jobs require three, four, or even five rounds of interviews. While that may feel excessive, Oracle is a world-renown company that gets a slew of applicants.
Since that’s the case, Oracle can typically afford to be a bit picky. Make sure you’re comfortable with powering through a multi-round hiring process before you apply. That way, you’ll have the right mindset to make it to the end and hopefully snag an offer.
Top 5 Oracle Interview Questions
Oracle is an incredibly large company that hires professionals in a wide range of niches. Since that’s the case, you could face different questions depending on the type of job you’re trying to land. After all, they won’t ask a financial professional coding questions, as that’s not relevant to the role.
However, since Oracle is mainly a technology company, we’re going to focus on the technical professions. With that in mind, here’s a look at our top five Oracle interview questions and answers.
1. Tell me about your experience with Oracle.
When you’re interviewing for a company that’s known for specific products or services, there’s a good chance the hiring manager is going to ask about your past experience with the company’s offerings. Ideally, you’ll be able to discuss moments from your work history involving the product or service.
Academic experience is also fine, particularly if you’re looking to land an entry-level opportunity. Just make sure you can discuss a few specifics.
EXAMPLE ANSWER:
“As a recent graduate, most of my experience with Oracle has been academic. Since my major focused on database management and administration, several courses dove into the technology. Additionally, I got hands-on time with Oracle while completing various projects, including group and individual assignments.
However, that isn’t my only experience with Oracle. While working as an intern at a local company, I handled database-related tasks regularly. That included updating data, initiating queries, and similar responsibilities.”
2. What’s something unique that you feel you can bring to Oracle?
This is a question designed to learn more about your personality or unconventional experience. Usually, you have two choices.
First, you can provide a trait-heavy answer, highlighting a few standout characteristics that you feel are potentially uncommon at Oracle and discussing how they’ll help you thrive. Second, you can go over an unconventional work, or personal experience that you feel may serve you well.
EXAMPLE ANSWER:
“One thing that makes me unique is my ability to communicate incredibly complex ideas to those without a technical background. The reason I’m skilled in this arena is that I have experience outside of the tech space.
Before I began studying database administration and data management, I explored a wide range of fields. That allows me to relate technical ideas to activities I performed in those other roles, making it easier to find common ground with professionals in other niches. Essentially, I can make connections between the concept I need to describe and something they’re already familiar with, shortening the learning curve dramatically.
Since Oracle is a technology company but has relationships with businesses and customers in a wide array of industries, I believe that’s a capability that can serve the company well.”
3. Can you describe aggregate functions in Oracle? What are some common ones?
This question is a knowledge check, allowing the hiring manager to see how much you understand about Oracle in a technical sense. Generally, you’ll simply want to outline what’s requested as a starting point, then give a little extra detail that shows an understanding beyond what’s asked.
EXAMPLE ANSWER:
“An aggregate function essentially joins values from multiple rows together, creating a single output that serves as a summary. For example, ‘average’ is an aggregate function, allowing you to get the mean value of a column over a select number of rows. ‘Count’ and ‘sum’ are also aggregate functions, giving you the number of non-NULL data points in a column and the sum total of the value of the data points in a column, respectively.
Generally, aggregate functions are used in conjunction with GROUP BY or HAVING clauses. That separates the rows into groups or filters them to ensure relevancy, allowing you to limit the data points factored into the calculation.”
4. Tell me how you would store images in an Oracle database.
While this is another knowledge check, how you approach your answer will be a little different. Instead of definitions, you need to outline your general process.
Typically, you won’t need to go keystroke by keystroke when you describe what you would do. Instead, outline your general approach, any constraints, and similar points to round out your response.
EXAMPLE ANSWER:
“If I needed to store images in an Oracle database, my first step is to determine if a new table is necessary. A table can only have one LONG column, and since images require the LONG RAW datatype, I need to confirm if another LONG column is already in place.
Once I know whether a LONG column exists, I can either insert the needed column into an existing table or create the new one. With the latter, I may need to replicate certain data points from the original table and use the INNER JOIN clause to forge a connection, suggesting that the images need to connect to the information contained in another table. At that point, the images can be stored in the appropriate column.”
5. Create a query to learn the average cost of a service listed in a table.
This is closer to a technical interview question, as it asks you to essentially write out a query. If the prompt is presented in this manner, you’ll usually need to provide a few details first. Then, you can create the query.
EXAMPLE ANSWER:
“If I needed to find the average cost of a service listed in a table, I would use the average function and GROUP BY clause to get the needed information. If the table was called ‘Services’ and the column containing the cost information was called “Price,” the query would be ‘SELECT AVG(Price) FROM Services GROUP BY Price;’ as that should deliver the needed information.”
70 More Oracle Interview Questions
Here are 70 more Oracle interview questions:
- Why do you want to work for Oracle?
- What do you know about our company?
- Why did you choose a career in technology?
- How do you handle pressure or stress while on the job?
- Do you have any coding preferences?
- Tell me about your experience with SQL.
- Oracle was developed in what language?
- What’s a snapshot in Oracle?
- Can you tell me the components of an Oracle physical database structure?
- In regards to the Oracle database, what is a tablespace?
- What are the default tablespaces in Oracle?
- What’s the difference between the varchar and varchar2 data types?
- How do online and offline tablespaces differ?
- What is the RAW datatype?
- Tell me about the memory layers in an Oracle shared pool?
- What is an NVL function for?
- What’s a save point in an Oracle database?
- Give a quick overview of the Oracle database objects.
- What is the purpose of the ANALYZE command in Oracle?
- What are the most common Oracle forms modules?
- Can you describe the logical backup mechanism in Oracle?
- What are synonyms in Oracle databases?
- Tell me about recursive hints.
- What are the limitations of the CHECK constraint?
- Tell me the difference between JVM, JRE, and JDK.
- Describe your experience with REST API.
- How would you use nested tables?
- How are comments represented in Oracle?
- What’s the difference between REPLACE and TRANSLATE?
- How do you display table rows while ensuring there aren’t any duplicates?
- What does the NULL value represent in Oracle?
- What are merge statements used for?
- Give me an example of a USING clause.
- What does a GROUP BY clause do?
- Describe what a subquery is and outline the different types of subqueries in Oracle.
- What is cross join?
- List the temporal datatypes and what they do in Oracle.
- How are privileges created in Oracle?
- Tell me what VArray is.
- What’s the difference between alias and rename?
- Tell me what a View is.
- What are cursor variables? What about cursor attributes?
- What would you do if you needed to delete duplicate rows in a table?
- How are hash clusters used?
- What is the purpose of alerts in Oracle?
- How do you see the current date and time associated with the operating system where a database is running?
- What are actual parameters, and what are they used for?
- How do formal parameters differ from actual parameters?
- Tell me about your experience with the Agile methodology?
- Have you ever led a project? What was that experience like?
- Which part of your professional experience do you feel makes you particularly well suited to this job?
- If you had a conflict with a colleague, how would you work to resolve it?
- What style of manager do you prefer?
- Do you prefer independent work or handling responsibilities with a team?
- If you had to sell Oracle to a CEO, what benefits would you highlight?
- Is there anything you dislike about using Oracle databases? How would you improve the experience to address those issues?
- How does Oracle stand apart from its competitors?
- Do you think there are upcoming opportunities in the market that will help Oracle grow?
- How do you stay on top of technology trends?
- What’s the maximum number of triggers that can be applied to one table?
- How do you typically fit into a team dynamic?
- How do you view the last record added to a table?
- Are you multilingual? If so, are you comfortable speaking with international teams in languages other than English?
- Tell me about your experience with Java. What about Python?
- If you had to convert the numbers on checks to words, how would you create a program to do that?
- How do you respond to constructive criticism?
- How would your past colleagues describe you as a professional? What about your last manager?
- If you didn’t choose a job in technology, what field would you explore instead?
- Do you have plans to further your education?
- If you don’t land this job, would you go after another position at Oracle if one comes available?
5 Good Questions to Ask at the End of an Oracle Interview
When you reach the end of your interview, you’ll typically get a chance to ask the hiring manager a few questions. This is a chance to learn more about the hiring process, role, company culture, and more, so don’t let it pass you by.
While you can ask questions based on points that occur to you during the interview, having a few in your back pocket is also a wise move. If you aren’t sure what to bring up, here are five good questions to ask at the end of an Oracle interview.
- Can you describe a typical day in this role?
- Since Oracle is an ever-evolving technology company, how do you envision this role changing over time?
- How does Oracle use education or training opportunities to ensure its teams are up-to-date?
- What initially attracted you to Oracle? Do you feel that the company met your expectations?
- How supportive is Oracle of employees that want to go back to school while continuing to work?
Putting It All Together
Ultimately, answering interview questions for Oracle can be intimidating, but you can nail them with some preparation. Use all of the tips and information above to your advantage. That way, when you’re tackling the Oracle interview questions, you can be sure to impress.
Good luck!
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Co-Founder and CEO of TheInterviewGuys.com. Mike is a job interview and career expert and the head writer at TheInterviewGuys.com.
His advice and insights have been shared and featured by publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, CNBC and more as well as educational institutions such as the University of Michigan, Penn State, Northeastern and others.
Learn more about The Interview Guys on our About Us page.