There was just a single phone interview, lasting about 40 minutes.

They asked me to talk about myself and my current job. The technical questions were very basic; only one probed for knowledge at an intermediate level. After a few minutes, it was obvious to me that I knew more about MySQL than the DBA asking the technical questions.

When it was my turn to question them, I asked my prospective colleague what a typical day is like. He said that they watch monitoring and wait for tickets to come in. There was no attempt on their part to even pretend that the job might be fun or challenging. I was not burning with excitement at this point.

About two weeks later, the recruiter emailed me to say that they wanted to make an offer. The range she gave was in the "low to mid 70's," which struck me as absurdly cheap for an experienced and qualified DBA. I replied that I needed to not go below a certain minimum.

A week later, I received a phone call from a different HPE recruiter to extend me an offer at said minimum. I countered with a number that was more than reasonable and still far below the market rate I had originally specified. I had substantial misgivings by now, but I wanted to see what they'd say. They wouldn't budge.

After reading the horror stories on Glassdoor, googling "HPE layoffs," reflecting on their flimsy selection process, and stingy offer, I decided to turn them down.

Compare and contrast some of the storage engines MySQL uses.

How do the MySQL replication threads work?

How would you approach troubleshooting a slow MySQL server?

How would you fix replication when the relay log is corrupted?

What backup methods are you familiar with?