Fidessa Technical Consultant


To anybody who needs advice/ help…

I have just been offered a job with Fidessa as a Technical Consultant. This site has been a great help to me so far providing experiences and guidance… I thought its only fair if I do the same in return…

1st interview - 2 people: Team leader and Technical Manager

  • First did a industry standard technical test which comprised of the following:- Windows commands of what the , unix commands and sql states (e.g how to select, insert and update in/from a table).

  • Interview: This was an hour long. The Technical manager asked most of the questions which mostly went through my CV and fired off questions from it, e.g. What platforms have you worked on? what technologies have you used? go through the system architecture and tell me about points of failure and how to minimise loss of data?

  • You are expected to ask questions on the Business/ product/ role you are interviewed for.

2nd Interview - 2 people: Team Leader and Technical Manager

  • Round 2… there was a practical for an hour. Whilst carrying out the practical I was expected to state the reason why I am doing what I am doing? and the outcome I was expecting? Here is the practical below:
  1. Write a script (connection.bat) which connects to an Oracle DB (the connection details were provided). For this exercise I checked the tnsnames.ora to see if the entry exists? In this case it was missing so I inserted the entry in the file and tested the connection via tnsping.

  2. The script also had to run a series of SQL statements but without user action and spool the contents. e.g. create a file called test.sql and within it the syntax would be:

spool test.txt
select count(1) from table_name where column_name =‘XXXX’
spool off

then back to the original script, connection.bat, and update it so it runs the file upon login:

sqlplus username/password@SID @test.sql

  1. Login to toad/sqldeveloper and run the query provided. Explain why it has taken a long time (around 5 seconds to come back with results) instead of coming back instantly. Answer: add an index.
    Action: create the index and run the query again to prove its faster.

  2. Start an application on Linux. After trying to start the app, it cited errors with the library. Follow the script and work out where the library is, once you find the library check why it is citing these errors:

a) do an ldd on the lib and see which libraries it is reading are missing.
b) once found then go to cd / (home directory of the user) and look for their profile. edit their profile and insert that specific library.

Last meeting with Senior Management.



Great post! Any chance you know if the practical for all roles, including delivery engineer? Seems very techical, just not sure how I should go about preparing for it. Any ideas??
Also, any how long the entire interview lasts?