Senior Roles in SQL - List common replication and high availability scenario questions

Common Replication & High Availability Scenario Questions for Senior Roles

Replication Scenarios

• What would you do if replication between primary and secondary servers fails unexpectedly?
  Explores your troubleshooting workflow, includes identifying network issues, checking logs, and implementing failover or recovery procedures.

• How do you handle data consistency issues in asynchronous or synchronous replication setups?
  Tests understanding of replication modes, latency, conflict resolution, and data integrity assurance.

• Describe a process to troubleshoot latency issues in replication.
  Looks at your diagnostic steps, such as monitoring network traffic, checking replication agents, and performance tuning.

• What strategies would you deploy to ensure replication remains synchronized across multiple data centers?
  Involves multi-site replication strategies, latency considerations, and consistency models like eventual or strong consistency.

High Availability (HA) Scenarios

• Design an architecture for high availability for a mission-critical database system.
  You should discuss clustering, replication, load balancing, failover mechanisms, and disaster recovery planning.

• Explain the failover process in a SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group or Oracle Data Guard setup.
  Focuses on automatic vs. manual failover processes, quorum configuration, and data synchronization considerations.

• How would you plan for disaster recovery in a multi-region deployment?
  Cover RTO/RPO, geographical redundancy, data replication across regions, and automated failover procedures.

• What steps would you take to diagnose a failover failure or an unexpected downtime event?
  Problem-solving focus: reviewing logs, checking network and storage, ensuring quorum health, and testing failover readiness.

• Describe the procedure to test disaster recovery and high availability configurations without impacting production.
  Details on dry runs, secondary system validations, and ensuring minimal or no downtime during testing.

Monitoring & Troubleshooting

• What tools and metrics do you monitor for ensuring high availability and replication health?
  Use of monitoring tools (SQL Server Management Studio, SAP HANA Cockpit, Azure Monitor), key metrics (latency, replication lag, failover counts).

• What are typical causes of replication lag or data loss?
  Network issues, disk IO bottlenecks, misconfigured replication settings, or unidirectional failures.

Tips for Responding in Senior Roles

• Highlight your experience in designing scalable, resilient architectures.

• Demonstrate a proactive approach with preventive monitoring and regular testing.

• Explain your incident handling process concisely, emphasizing troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and documentation.

• Use real-world examples to illustrate your problem-solving capabilities and decision-making under pressure.

These questions reflect the depth of knowledge expected at senior levels and can help interviewers assess your expertise in managing complex, distributed, and highly available systems.