Calculate DAU/MAU ratio per date

Last updated: August 19, 2025

Quick Overview

Write a query to compute DAU/MAU ratio grouped by user, handling edge cases like nulls and duplicates.

Capital One
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)
Data Scientist
Capital One
August 19, 2025
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)
Medium

98

7

2,480 solved


Write a query to compute DAU/MAU ratio grouped by user, handling edge cases like nulls and duplicates.

Data manipulation questions at Capital One test your ability to work with real-world datasets. This Technical Screen question evaluates your SQL proficiency, understanding of data modeling, and ability to derive insights from raw data.

What the Interviewer Expects
  • Use advanced SQL features: window functions, CTEs, subqueries
  • Write efficient queries that avoid common performance pitfalls
  • Handle complex data transformations with multiple joins and aggregations
  • Discuss indexing strategy and query optimization
  • Address data quality issues: duplicates, missing values, outliers
Key Topics to Cover
Subqueries and correlated subqueries
Common Table Expressions (CTEs)
Date/time manipulation
Data cleaning and transformation
How to Approach This
  1. Clarify the schema and expected output format before writing queries.
  2. Use CTEs (WITH clauses) to break complex queries into readable steps.
  3. Consider window functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG, LEAD) for ranking and sequential analysis.
  4. Watch for NULLs, duplicates, and edge cases in JOINs and GROUP BY.
  5. For pandas, prefer vectorized operations over row-by-row iteration.
Possible Follow-up Questions
  • How would you optimize this query for a table with 100 million rows?
  • How would you handle this if the data was spread across multiple databases?
  • How would you validate the correctness of your query results?
  • Can you rewrite this without using subqueries?
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Practice SQL Problems
Sample Answer
Problem Understanding

To calculate the Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) ratio per date, we need to work with a dataset containing user activity logs. The relevant columns typically include user_id,...

Approach
  1. CTE for DAU: Create a Common Table Expression (CTE) to calculate daily active users by selecting distinct user_id for each activity_date.
  2. CTE for MAU: Create another CTE to calculate...

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