Database Administrator (PostgreSQL) practice interview
PostgreSQL performance, replication, backup recovery, access control and safe production changes. Practise the 5 questions interviewers ask for this role with follow-ups. Paid plans add scored feedback on every answer.
Free with an Intaviu account: 320 credits a month, at 10 credits a minute of practice. Private: interview creators never see them.
- Mid level
- 20 minutes
- 5 questions
- Scored feedback on paid plans
About the role
This interview covers the day-to-day ownership of production PostgreSQL databases, including performance, availability, recovery and access. The panel is looking for evidence-led diagnosis, careful change planning and proof that recovery arrangements work when needed.
How to prepare
- Revise PostgreSQL query plans, locking, vacuum behaviour, indexing and the statistics used during diagnosis.
- Prepare an example of a database incident where you separated symptoms from the underlying cause.
- Be ready to explain backup, restore, replication and failover choices against recovery needs.
- Practise describing a low-risk upgrade or schema change with validation and rollback steps.
Common mistakes
- Suggesting configuration changes before collecting workload and query evidence.
- Treating a successful backup job as proof that restoration will work.
- Ignoring locks, storage limits or rollback when planning production changes.
What to expect
A real first-round interview
5 questions the way interviewers ask for this role, with follow-ups when an answer needs more.
Spoken, like the real thing
Speak your answers in your browser or the free desktop app, with live captions. You can ask the interviewer to repeat anything.
Scored on 4 areas
The things this interview weighs most. With a paid plan, your report shows how you did on each one.
A private report
On Plus, Pro and Premium: every answer scored, your strongest lines quoted and what to say differently next time. Interview creators never see it.
More engineering practice
Database Reliability Engineer (Fintech)
Database performance, high availability, recovery, safe schema changes and incident response for financial workloads.
EngineeringNetwork Engineer
Routing, switching, firewall policy, network monitoring, resilient connectivity and incident troubleshooting.
EngineeringProPacket Core Engineer
Mobile data session flows, packet core performance, policy control, charging interfaces and service restoration.