Join products and orders to find engagement score

Last updated: November 5, 2025

Quick Overview

Write a query joining products and rides to produce the combined engagement score.

Palantir
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)
Data Scientist
Palantir
November 5, 2025
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)
Easy

445

3

1,974 solved

Write a query joining products and rides to produce the combined engagement score.

This question from Palantir's Technical Screen tests practical data skills. The interviewer wants to see clean, efficient queries that handle edge cases like NULLs, duplicates, and large datasets.

What the Interviewer Expects
  • Write syntactically correct SQL with proper JOIN and WHERE clauses
  • Use GROUP BY and aggregate functions appropriately
  • Handle NULL values correctly in your queries
  • Explain the query execution plan at a high level
Key Topics to Cover
Index optimization and query performance
Window functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG, LEAD)
Common Table Expressions (CTEs)
JOIN types and when to use each
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 validate the correctness of your query results?
  • How would you handle this if the data was spread across multiple databases?
  • What indexes would you create to support this query?
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Practice SQL Problems
Sample Answer
Problem Understanding

In this problem, we need to analyze data from two tables: products and orders. The products table contains information about products, while the orders table includes details about customer or...

Approach
  1. Identify Key Columns: Determine the primary keys for both tables. Typically, products might have a product_id, and orders would have a product_id to link to the products.
  2. **Join Tabl...
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