Easy SQL Questions for Data Analysts

Data analyst interviews and technical screens generally start with beginner SQL
questions. There are two main types of easy SQL questions:

• Basic SQL Queries - You will often be asked basic SQL interview questions that
require you to write a query. You might be asked to get the COUNT of a table,
make a simple join, or use the HAVING clause.
• Definitions - Less frequently encountered, these questions ask you to explain
technical concepts, compare two or more SQL functions or define how a concept
is used.

Here are nine easy SQL questions for data analysts:

1. When would you use the GROUP BY statement?

The GROUP BY clause enables us to compute aggregate values alongside discrete data by
collapsing the distinct rows of our database into summary rows that share a particular
characteristic.

If you were to attempt to formulate a query selecting a number of rows with

a WHERE clause, and then display an aggregate value alongside, you would find that the
query would return an error. This is because SQL is not able to display, in a single table,
the results of our WHERE query as a list of values conjoined with the aggregate value you
are looking for.

2. What are the most common aggregate functions in SQL? What do they
do?

An aggregate function performs a calculation on a set of values and returns a single

value summarizing the set. The three most common aggregate functions in SQL
are: COUNT, SUM, and AVG.

• COUNT - Returns the number of items of a group.

• SUM - Returns the sum of ALL or DISTINCT values in an expression.
• AVG - Returns the average of values in a group (and ignores NULL values).

3. What is a unique key in SQL?

In SQL, a unique key is one or more columns or fields that identify a record in a
database. Tables can have multiple unique keys, which is a difference between unique
keys and primary keys. With unique keys, only one NULL value is accepted for the
column and it cannot have duplicate values.

4. What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL?

UNION and UNION ALL are SQL operators used to concatenate two or more result sets.
This allows us to write multiple SELECT statements, retrieve the desired results, then
combine them together into a final, unified set.

The main difference between UNION and UNION ALL is that:

• UNION: only keeps unique records.

• UNION ALL: keeps all records, including duplicates.

5. What is the difference between a RIGHT JOIN and a LEFT JOIN?

The two most common types of joins in SQL are LEFT and RIGHT. The main difference is
that these JOIN operators deal with matched and unmatched rows.

A LEFT JOIN includes all records from the left table and matched rows from the right.
A RIGHT JOIN returns all rows from the right table and unmatched rows from the left.

6. What is the difference between a table and a view?

Tables contain data and they are made up of columns and rows. A view is a virtual table,
which generally is dependent on data from the table for its display.

One use case for a view can be found if you wanted to look at a subset of data from a
table. You could create a view using the SELECT command to query the data.

7. What SQL operator is used for pattern matching?

The LIKE operator is used to search for a specific pattern within a column. It is used with
a WHERE clause to query specific columns.

LIKE is used with two wildcard characters:

• % represents a 0, 1 or multiple characters

• _ (underscore) represents a single character
Here are a few examples:

WHERE Employee Name LIKE '%r' - Finds matches that end with "r"

WHERE Employee NAME LIKE '%gh%' - Finds matches that include "gh" in any position `

WHERE Employee NAME LIKE '_ch%' - Finds matches with "ch" in the second and third positions

WHERE Employee NAME LIKE 'g%r' - Finds matches that start with "g" and end with "r"
8. What command would you use to update data in a table?

You update an existing table with the UPDATE command in SQL. It is used
with SET (which includes the updated information) and WHERE to select the specific
instance.

Example: In the table ‘Employees’, you want to change the emergency contact,
ContactName, for an employee with EmployeeID 3.

UPDATE Employees
SET ContactName = "Bob Smith"
WHERE EmployeeID = 3;
9. Which operator is used to select values within a range? What types of
values can be selected?

The BETWEEN operator is used to select values within a range. You can use numbers,
texts or dates with BETWEEN.

One important thing to note: the BETWEEN operator includes both the start and end
dates.

SELECT EmployeeID
FROM Employees
WHERE EmployeeID BETWEEN 378 AND 492
Intermediate SQL Questions for Data Analysts
For mid-level data analyst roles, expect intermediate SQL questions to challenge your
knowledge and skill. Medium SQL questions fall into two buckets:

• Complex SQL queries - Intermediate SQL questions ask you to perform joins,
sub-queries, self-joins, and window functions.
 • SQL/Analytics case studies - Many intermediate questions take the form of case
studies or ask you to perform analysis on the data you pull from a query.

Here are some medium SQL questions for data analysts:

10. Given the tables users and rides, write a query to report the distance
traveled by each user in descending order.

For this question, you need to accomplish two things: the first is to figure out the total
distance traveled for each user_id, and the second is to order from greatest to least
each user_id by a calculated distance traveled.

This question has been asked in Uber data analyst interviews.

11. Write a query to find all the users that are currently “Excited” and
have never been “Bored” within a campaign.

For this medium SQL problem, assume you work at an advertising firm. You have a table
of users’ impressions of ad campaigns over time. Each user_id from these campaigns has
an attached impression_id, categorized as either “Excited” or “Bored”. You will need to
assess which users are “Excited” by their most recent campaign and have never been
“Bored” in any past campaign.

See a full solution to this problem on YouTube:

Note: This is the type of question that might get asked for a marketing analyst job.
12. Write a SQL query to select the second-highest salary in the
engineering department.

To answer this question, you need the name of the department to be associated with
each employee in the employees table to understand which department each employee is
a part of.

The “department_id” field in the employees table is associated with the “id” field in
the departments table. You can call the “department_id” a foreign key because it is a
column that references the primary key of another table, which in this case is the “id”
field in the departments table.

Based on this shared field, you can join both tables using INNER JOIN to associate the
department name with their employees.

SELECT salary
FROM employees
INNER JOIN departments
ON employees.department_id = departments.id
With the department name in place you can now look at the employees of the
Engineering team and sort by salary to find the second highest paid.

13. Given a table of bank transactions, write a query to get the last
transaction for each day.

More Context: The table includes the columns: id, transaction_value and created_at
(representing the time for each transaction).

Since our goal in this problem is to pull the last transaction from each day, you want to
group the transactions by the day they occurred and create a chronological order within
each day from which you can retrieve the latest transaction.

To accomplish the task of grouping and order, create a modified version of the
bank_transactions table with an added column denoting the chronological ordering of
transactions within each day.

To partition by date, you can use an OVER() statement. After partitioning, you should use
a descending order so that the first entry in each partition is the last transaction
chronologically. Here is how that query can be written:

SELECT (*), ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY DATE(created_at)

ORDER BY created_at DESC)

AS ordered_time
14. Write a query to debug an error and select the top five most
expensive projects by budget-to-employee ratio.

More context: You are given two tables. A projects table and another that maps
employees to their projects, called employee_projects. In this question, however, a bug
exists that is causing duplicate rows in the employee_projects table.

Example:

Input:

projects table

column type
id INTEGER
title VARCHAR
state_date DATETIME
end_date DATETIME
budget INTEGER
employee_projects table

Column Type
project_id INTEGER
employee_id INTEGER
Output:

Column Type
title VARCHAR
budget_per_employee FLOAT
This is a good example of a logic-based SQL problem. Although there are a few steps to
the solution, the actual SQL queries are fairly simple.

HINT: One way to do the debugging is to group by columns project_id

simply and employee_id. By grouping by both columns, you are creating a table that provides
distinct values on project_id and employee_id, thereby excluding any duplicates.
15. You have a table that represents the total number of messages sent
between two users by date on Facebook Messenger. Answer these
questions:

• What are some insights that could be derived from this table?
• What do you think the distribution of the number of conversations created by
each user per day looks like?
• Write a query to get the distribution of the number of conversations created by
each user by day in 2020.

This question tests your data sense, as well as your SQL writing skills. It has also
appeared in Facebook data analyst interviews.

To answer the first part of the question regarding insights, there are a number of
metrics you could evaluate. You can find the total number of messages sent per day, the
number of conversations being started, or the average number of messages per
conversation. All of these metrics seek to find users’ level of engagement and
connectivity.

You can find a full solution on parts one through three in the following YouTube video:

16. Write a SQL query to create a histogram of the number of comments

per user in the month of January 2020.
This intermediate SQL question has been asked in Amazon data analyst interviews. Here
is a partial answer from Interview Query:

What does a histogram represent, and what kind of story does it tell? In this case, you
are interested in using a histogram to represent the distribution of comments each user
has made in January 2020. A histogram with bin buckets of size one means that you can
avoid the logical overhead of grouping frequencies into specific intervals.

For example, if you want a histogram of size five, you would have to run a SELECT
statement like so:

SELECT
CASE WHEN frequency BETWEEN 0 AND 5 THEN 5
WHEN frequency BETWEEN 5 AND 10 THEN 10 etc..
17. Select the largest three departments with ten or more employees and
rank them according to the percentage of employees making over
100,000 dollars.

In this problem, you are given two tables: An employees table and a departments table.

Example:

Input:

employees table

Columns Type
id INTEGER
first_name VARCHAR
last_name VARCHAR
salary INTEGER
department_id INTEGER
departments table

Columns Type
id INTEGER
name VARCHAR
Output:
 Column Type
percentage_over_100k FLOAT
department_name VARCHAR
number of employees INTEGER
First, break down the question to understand what it’s asking. Specifically, you break
the question down into three clauses of conditions:

• Top three departments by employee count.

• % of employees making over $\$100,000$ a year. - The department must have at
least ten employees. From here, think about how you would associate employees
with their department, calculate and display the percentage of employees
making over $\$100,000$ a year, and order those results to provide an answer
to the original question.

18. Given a table of students and their SAT test scores, write a query to
return the two students with the closest test scores by score difference.

Given that this problem is referencing one table with only two columns, you have
to self-reference different creations of the same table. It is helpful to think about this
problem in the form of two different tables with the same values.

There are two parts to this question:

• The first part compares each combination of students and their SAT scores.
• The second part is figuring out which two students’ scores are the closest.

19. Write a query to support or disprove the hypothesis: Clickthrough

Rate (CTR) is dependent on search rating.

This question provides a table that represents search results on Facebook, including a
query, a position, and a human rating.

20. Write a query to get the number of customers that were upsold by
purchasing additional products.

For this problem, you are given a table of product purchases. Each row in the table
represents an individual product purchase.

Note: If the customer purchased two things on the same day, that does not count as an
upsell, as they were purchased within a similar timeframe. We are looking for a
customer returning on a different date to purchase a product.
This question is a little tricky because you have to note the dates that each user
purchased products. You can’t just group by the user_id and look where the number of
products purchased is greater than one because of the upsell condition.

You have to group by both the date field and the user_id to get each transaction broken
out by day and user:

SELECT
user_id
, DATE(created_at) AS date
FROM transactions
GROUP BY 1,2
The query above will now give us a user_id and date field for each row. If there exists a
duplicate user_id, then you know that the user purchased on multiple days, which
satisfies the upsell condition. What comes next?

21. Given the transactions table below, write a query that finds the third
purchase of every user.

Note: Sort the results by the user_id in ascending order. If a user purchases two products
at the same time, the lower ID field is used to determine which is the first purchase.

Example:

Input:

transactions table

Columns Type
id INTEGER
user_id INTEGER
created_at DATETIME
product_id INTEGER
quantity INTEGER
Output:

Columns Type
user_id INTEGER
created_at DATETIME
Columns Type
product_id INTEGER
quantity INTEGER
Here is a helpful hint for this question: You need an indicator of which purchase was the
third by a specific user. Whenever you are thinking of ranking a dataset, it is helpful to
immediately think of a specific window function you can use. You need to apply the
RANK function to the transactions table. The RANK function is a window function that
assigns a rank to each row in the partition of the result set.

SELECT *, RANK() OVER (

PARTITION BY user_id ORDER BY created_at ASC
) AS rank_value
FROM transactions
LIMIT 100
22. Write a query to retrieve the number of users who have posted each
of their job listings only once and the number of users who have posted
at least one job multiple times.

This is a LinkedIn data analyst interview question. See a full solution to this question on
YouTube:

23. Write a query to get the top three highest employee salaries for each
department.
For this problem, you are given an employees and a departments table.

Note: If the department contains less than three employees, the top two or top one
highest salaries should be listed.

Here’s a hint: You need to order the salaries by department. A window function is useful
here. Window functions enable calculations within a certain partition of rows. In this
case, the RANK() function would be useful. What would you put in the PARTITION BY
and ORDER BY clauses?

Your window function can look something like this:

RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY id ORDER BY metric DESC) AS ranks

Note: When you substitute for the actual id and metric fields, make sure the substitutes
are relevant to the question asked and aligned with the data provided to you.

24. Write a query to find the number of non-purchased seats for each
flight.

In this Robinhood data analyst question, assume you work for a small airline, and you
are given three tables: flights, planes, and flight_purchases.

To get the number of unsold seats per flight, you need to get each flight’s total number
of seats available and the total seats sold.

You can do an inner join on all 3 tables since the question states that
the flight_purchases table does not have entries of flights or seats that do not exist.

To calculate the number of seats per flight, you use GROUP BY on the flight_id together
with COUNT() on seat_id to get a count of seats sold. You then do the calculation of the
number of total seats on the flight minus the total seats sold to reach how many seats
remained unsold.

25. Given a transactions table with date timestamps, sample every fourth
row ordered by date.

Here’s a hint for this question to get you started: If you are sampling from this table and
you want to sample every fourth value specifically, you will probably have to use
a window function.
A general rule of thumb to follow is that when a question states or asks for some Nth
value (like the third purchase of each customer or the tenth notification sent), then a
window function is the best option. Window functions allow us to use the RANK() or
ROW_NUMBER() function to provide a numerical index based on a certain ordering.

26. Write a query that returns all of the neighborhoods that have zero
users.

More Context: You are given two tables: the first is a users table with demographic
information and the neighborhoods they live in, and the second is a neighborhoods table.

This is an intermediate SQL problem that requires you to write a simple query. Our task
is to find all the neighborhoods without users. To reframe the task, you need all the
neighborhoods that do not have a single user living in them. This means you have to
introduce a column in one table but not in the other, such that you can see user counts
by neighborhood.
Hard SQL Questions for Data Analysts

Advanced SQL questions are common for mid- and senior-level data analyst jobs, and
they require you to write advanced SQL queries or work through complex logic-based
case studies. The two types of questions include:

• Advanced SQL writing - Writing queries to debug code, using indices to tune
SQL queries, and using advanced SQL clauses.
• Logic-based questions - These questions can be more challenging analytics
cases studies or queries that first require you to solve a logic-based problem.

27. An online marketplace company has introduced a new feature that

allows potential buyers and sellers to conduct audio chats with each
other prior to transacting. Answer the following questions:

• How would you measure the success of this new feature?

• Write a query that can represent if the feature is successful or not.

Here’s the full solution to this complex data analytics case study on YouTube:
28. Write a query to get the total three-day rolling average for deposits
by day.

For this question, you are given a table of bank transactions with three columns:
user_id, a deposit or withdrawal value (determined if the value is positive or negative),
and created_at time for each transaction.

Here’s a hint: Usually, if the problem asks to solve for a moving/rolling average, you
are provided the dataset in the form of a table with two columns: date and value. This
problem is taken one step further as it provides a table of just transactions, with an
interest in filtering for deposits (positive value) and removing records representing
withdrawals (negative value, e.g. -10).

You also need to know the total deposit amount (sum of all deposits) for each day, as it
will factor into calculating the numerator for the rolling three-day average:

rolling three-day avg for day 3 = [day 3 + day 2 + day 1] / 3

29. Write a SQL query that creates a cumulative distribution of the
number of comments per user. Assume bin buckets class intervals of
one.

To solve this cumulative distribution practice problem, you are given two tables,
a users table and a comments table.
frequency cumulative
0 10
1 25
2 27
30. Write a query to display a graph to understand how unsubscribes are
affecting login rates over time.

For this question, assume that you work at Twitter. Twitter wants to roll out more push
notifications to users because they think users are missing out on good content. Twitter
decides to do this in an A/B test. After you release more push notifications, you
suddenly see the total number of unsubscribes increase. How would you visually
represent this growth in unsubscribes and its effect on login rates?

31. You are given a table of user experiences representing each person’s
past employment history. Answer the following:

Write a query to prove or disprove this hypothesis: Data scientists who switch jobs
more frequently become managers faster than data scientists that stay at one job for
longer.

For this question, you are interested in analyzing the career paths of data scientists.
Let’s say that the titles you care about are bucketed into three categories: data scientist,
senior data scientist, and data science manager.

Here’s a partial solution to this question:

This question requires a bit of creative problem-solving to understand how you can
prove or disprove the hypothesis. The hypothesis is that data scientists who end up
switching jobs more often get promoted faster. Therefore, in analyzing this dataset, you
can prove this hypothesis by separating the data scientists into specific segments on
how often they switch jobs in their careers.

For example, if you looked at the number of job switches for data scientists that have
been in their field for five years, you could prove the hypothesis that the number of data
science managers increased with the number of times they had switched jobs.

• Never switched jobs: 10% are managers

• Switched jobs once: 20% are managers
• Switched jobs twice: 30% are managers
• Switched jobs three times: 40% are managers