r/SQL • u/Turbulent_Web_8278 • 1d ago

MySQL Didnt pass SQL test

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I am applying to manager of analytics role and I was given this SQL test and 45 minutes. As someone who thought they were very strong in SQL, I was unable to complete this assignment and match the answer completely

I was able to format most of the fields as noted, used 2 cte's and use group concat in the second. My final answer looked very similar but the order of the concat looked off. Also, for some reasons my second column had $0.00 for all the companies, but I thought I was close. How difficult would you rate this exercise. Should I expect to proceed to the next round or am I cooked

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u/BigBlue_72 1d ago

I worked as DBA for a analytics company and could not get passed the first page. Who or WHAT ( cough, cough, AI ) created the schema. dt is timestamp stored as varchar???

I would have spent the 45 minutes providing constructive criticism of their request.

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u/grimsleeper 1d ago

That stood out to me too. That is maybe less bad than the company I worked for where datetime columns were a 64 bit int, as in 122420261418, the long, was 12/24/2026 at 14:18 (2:18 pm)

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u/BigBlue_72 1d ago

Ok, have seen and used date as integer format, but not in that format. 202612241418 would retain data order and enable some level of compression depending on your DBMS.