Write a query to find engagement score from products

Last updated: December 9, 2025

Quick Overview

Write a SQL query to calculate engagement score from the products table, considering nulls and duplicates.

DE Shaw
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)
Data Scientist
DE Shaw
December 9, 2025
Data Scientist
Phone Screen
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)
Medium

127

4

2,076 solved


Write a SQL query to calculate engagement score from the products table, considering nulls and duplicates.

DE Shaw asks this during the Phone Screen because data engineering skills are critical for the role. You should be comfortable with complex joins, window functions, CTEs, and performance optimization.

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
Window functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG, LEAD)
Pandas vectorized operations and groupby
NULL handling and COALESCE
Common Table Expressions (CTEs)
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 handle slowly changing dimensions in this scenario?
  • How would you validate the correctness of your query results?
  • Can you rewrite this without using subqueries?
  • What would you do if this query needs to run every 5 minutes?
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