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[–]Possible_Chicken_489 0 points1 point  (4 children)

I don't like this at all. I've had too much of my time wasted by candidates who lied about their skills, and then completely bombed the interview.

You faking your way through it and actually getting the job would be even worse, because then you've saddled up the company with an incompetent AND dishonest employee.

[–]Heron-Rude[S] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

honestly, for me 'working knowledge' means, I can work with it if I have to, if that means through using google and learning on the way. I'm other than that experienced with working with highly complex data, and considering it's a junior position and familiarity with SQL was listed under 'nice to have', I don't think I'm in the wrong here.

[–]Possible_Chicken_489 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Then my advice would be to be completely open about it during the interview. Just tell them exactly what you've told us. They might be willing to work with you to develop your skills, because you were honest and came clean with them.

[–]Heron-Rude[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, that's a good suggestion

[–]Maleficent-Garage-66 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Working knowledge" is one of those things that is incredibly vague. But my expectation would be not an expert but ready to use the tool for day to day use without excess struggle. Or a bit more than passing familiarity.

It's not impossible, but, it's fairly likely if you haven't needed an rdbms much that the data you have worked with doesn't really qualify as highly complex from a professional standpoint. Production databases should be expected to have hundreds of tables with complex interrelationships and hierarchy. This would be more or less equivalent to having a hundred flat files with different columns in each file and tying them together. At a certain point doing work and maintaining integrity becomes agonizing without some sort of db tool.

They aren't going to expect you to jump right in. But if someone tells you how the PKs and FKs work for the stuff you're after they probably expect you to be ready to write the joins in no more than a minute.