Database Administrator
Database administrators keep data reliable, performant, and secure. This path covers the English for incident communication during database outages, writing runbooks, presenting capacity plans, and documenting backup and replication strategies.
Topics covered
- Query optimisation
- High availability & replication
- Backup & recovery
- Security & access control
- Capacity planning
- Performance monitoring
Vocabulary spotlight
4 terms every Database Administrator should know in English:
A situation where two or more transactions each hold locks the other needs, halting both
"The deadlock was caused by two transactions acquiring the same rows in reverse order."
In PostgreSQL, the process of reclaiming storage from dead rows and updating statistics
"We increased the autovacuum frequency after table bloat degraded query performance."
Point-In-Time Recovery — restoring a database to any moment in the past from WAL logs
"PITR let us recover the accidentally deleted records from three hours before the incident."
The delay between a write on the primary and its arrival on a replica
"Replication lag spiked to 45 seconds during the migration, which triggered read-replica alerts."
📚 Vocabulary Reference
Key terms organised by category for Database Administrators:
Performance
High Availability
Backup & Recovery
Security
Recommended exercises
Real-world scenarios you'll practise
- Writing a post-mortem for a database outage
- Presenting a capacity plan for the next 12 months to engineering leadership
- Explaining replication lag and its causes to the on-call development team
- Documenting a disaster recovery runbook for the operations team
🎯 Interview questions specific to this role
Practise answering these questions out loud — or in writing. Each question targets a real interviewer concern for Database Administrators.
- How do you diagnose a slow query and what steps do you take to optimise it?
- What is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous replication?
- How do you plan a large schema migration on a production database with zero downtime?
- What is PITR and when would you use it instead of a full backup?
- How do you approach database security for a multi-tenant SaaS application?