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How To Use LeetCode For Data Science SQL Interviews

July 30th, 2021

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Is LeetCode built for data science interview preparation? Let’s Fnd out with an in-depth analysis of
the platform and compare it to StrataScratch. Main Topics

LeetCode is the de facto and primary educational platform for people preparing for software Is LeetCode Designed To Prepare
You For Data Science Interviews?
development and software engineer (SWE) interviews, as well as for people looking to upskill their
LeetCode Data Science SQL
software development skills in general. According to their site, in two short years after launch, they
Interview
reached over 1 million users on their platform. LeetCode has all the coding questions you could
Using LeetCode To Practice
want to prepare for your software engineering interviews and includes over 1050 questions that SQL Questions
test for different technical concepts like data structures and search algorithms. So, is LeetCode Alternative Resources to
designed to prepare for data science interviews? Let’s Fnd out. LeetCode: A Data Science SQL
Resource SpeciFcally Designed
for Data Scientists

Is LeetCode Designed To Prepare You For Data Science Share

Interviews?

As an aspiring data scientist, you might have a question: Is LeetCode for data science? As great Follow
as LeetCode is to help software engineers get jobs, LeetCode was NOT designed to help prepare
data scientists for their data science interviews or improve their analytical skills. While both jobs
require programming skills, how the skills are implemented in the industry are different. Data
scientists are required to clean and manipulate data, and churn out insights from the data that
would lead to product decisions and recommendations. Manipulating the data to create metrics,
understanding those tradeoffs, building statistical and machine learning models are what data
scientists do on the job and what is being tested on data science interviews.

LeetCode focuses more on your technical algorithm skills to perform speciFc tasks like inverting a
binary tree or writing sorting algorithms in eXcient ways. How to implement technical concepts
effectively is the focus on software engineering interviews. How to manipulate and understand
data is the focus of data science interviews. In addition, there are non-coding concepts data
scientists need to understand and master to become a data scientist and succeed in interviews.
These include understanding machine learning theory (and implementing models), statistics,
probability, business cases, and product sense just to name a few. These are not the core focus of
LeetCode and forces the user to turn to other platforms and resources to master these concepts.

In the past, I’ve used LeetCode to prepare for my data science interviews but I had to temper my
expectations and use it mainly for brushing up on my SQL and python skills. In reality, I had to
stitch together multiple resources to prepare for my data science interview. It took me several
years and multiple job changes to Fnd the best resources to prepare for data science interviews.
I’ll focus this article on how I used LeetCode to help me prepare for my interviews but I’ll also
recommend several other resources that focus on the other speciFc aspects of data science
interviews like machine learning theory, statistics, and product sense to name a few.

LeetCode Data Science SQL Interview

In a data science coding interview, you’re asked to manipulate data and communicate insights
from the data, so there’s often a coding portion that tests your ability to do so. You can usually use
any coding language you’re comfortable with but the most popular ones are SQL, Python, and R.

LeetCode’s questions are more tailored towards algorithms where you’re tasked to search through
arrays and return speciFc values. How eXciently you do that and the accuracy of your solution are
what’s being evaluated.

While LeetCode has 1800 of these algorithm questions, they only have around 150 SQL questions.
However, these questions are mainly created for software developers and do not focus on data
insights like calculating month-over-month growth or user attribution scenarios that are important
to data scientists. Rather, LeetCode questions focus more on performing speciFc technical tasks
like joining tables together or Fnding the 2nd highest value in a dataset. Here are two questions to
illustrate what I mean:

Write a SQL query to get the second highest salary from the Employee table.
(https://leetcode.com/problems/second-highest-salary/)
Write a SQL query for a report that provides the following information for each person in the
Person table, regardless if there is an address for each of those people
(https://leetcode.com/problems/combine-two-tables/)

These types of questions on LeetCode are perfect for refreshing your SQL skills but they’re not
going to be enough for a data science interview. As a data scientist, you are expected to know how
to manipulate the data already but it’s your understanding of the coding tradeoffs and insights
from the data that are most important.

Using LeetCode To Practice SQL Questions

You can use LeetCode to refresh your SQL and Python skills, as well as benchmark your skills
against others on the platform. I would recommend using LeetCode at the very start of the
interview process to refresh your coding skills. Even if you do code every day and are comfortable
coding, solving these LeetCode questions will help you understand which technical concepts to
focus on and prepare for on interviews.

Here are places on LeetCode where you can practice your SQL coding.

LeetCode’s Database Section For Data Science

On the main page of Leetcode where you can explore the problems, you’ll see two areas that
contain SQL questions.

Main Questions Table

Accessing Questions

To access the database questions, follow the link, https://leetcode.com/problemset/database/,

and the table of questions will refresh to show only SQL type questions as shown below.

This is the primary way to practice SQL questions on LeetCode. Most of the LeetCode questions
are free but you can really only Flter the questions based on diXculty and whether or not the
question has a solution. Typically, on LeetCode, you should be able to Flter questions based on
topics (i.e., technical concepts) but these topics are reserved for algorithm type questions and
don’t include database type questions.

It would be nice to be able to Flter questions based on which companies have asked these
questions but it’s reserved for premium members. If you’re interviewing for a data science role, it
would be worth the upgrade to premium on LeetCode.

Question Editor Interface

Once you click into a question on LeetCode, you’re given the question prompt and table schema
so that you can start coding. It’s really helpful to be given a table schema with data types as this
would be given to you on interviews. LeetCode has three SQL dialects -- MySQL, MS SQL Server,
and Oracle. These are three very popular SQL dialects but it would have been nice to also offer
Postgres.

Solution Tab

LeetCode offers solutions on almost all their database questions, which is very helpful when
you’re stuck on a problem. What’s even better on LeetCode is that you have the ability to comment
on each problem and get help when needed.

Discuss Tab

LeetCode also has a discussion tab which is really a way for you to look at how other users have
solved the problem. Each user solution also has the ability to comment so you can learn more
about that user’s approach and discuss the tradeoffs between LeetCode’s oXcial solution and the
users. In my opinion, this is by far one of the best features LeetCode offers, especially when you
get to the more diXcult problems. As a data scientist, there are numerous ways to solve problems.
But each approach has its trade-offs, so understanding what those tradeoffs are and being able to
communicate them are essential for any interview.

Top Hits - Curated top 70

LeetCode also has a Top Hits section where they have selected the best questions for their users.
The SQL top hit is called “LeetCode Curated SQL 70”. This is a premium offering but can be found
here, https://leetcode.com/problemset/leetcode-curated-sql-70/.

It’s not obvious why LeetCode selected these 70 questions but I would guess it’s because they all
have solutions and good user engagement in the discussion sections. Quality is always hard to
Fnd, especially if you have a platform that contains 1000+ questions.

LeetCode For Data Science

Overall, LeetCode does provide a good starting point for you to prepare for your SQL data science
coding interviews. They have 150+ database questions that are free with the majority containing
solutions. The LeetCode platform has great features to help you get better at coding -- oXcial
solutions, user solutions, and discussions with other users will help you refresh your coding skills.

The drawback with LeetCode to prepare speciFcally for a SQL data science coding interview is
that their questions seem to only focus on the technical aspects of SQL, meaning that the
questions only require the user to join tables or Fnd the 2nd highest value in a dataset. In reality,
technical implementation skills are only one part of a data science interview. The main part is to
be able to manipulate data, create metrics, implement edge cases, and understand trade-offs.
This doesn’t seem to be a focus with LeetCode. Lastly, it would be nice to be able to Flter by the
company for free rather than upgrade.

Alternative Resources to LeetCode: A Data Science SQL

Resource SpeciLcally Designed for Data Scientists

One alternative to LeetCode that was built speciFcally for data scientists is StrataScratch.
StrataScratch was designed to offer data science interview questions that test not only the
technical implementation of SQL but also test data science concepts like implementing edge
cases, creating metrics, and manipulating the data. Because not only is it important to understand
how to manipulate the data but it’s important to implement solutions that compensate for real-life
scenarios and edge cases.

StrataScratch has over 500+ data science questions from real companies to help you prepare for
the coding portion of your data science interview.

StrataScratch was created because data scientists need questions that would redect concepts
covered in data science rather than in software engineering as LeetCode does.

Helpful Features For Your Data Science Interviews

As mentioned, the content of StrataScratch (i.e., the questions) are speciFc to data science but
the features are similar to many of the modern platforms out there like LeetCode and AlgoExpert.
Here are some of the helpful features that you’ll Fnd helpful whether or not you’re preparing for
your next data science interview.

Real Data Science Interview Questions From Real Companies (Filter By Company)

The ability to Flter by the company is more critical to have for data scientists than for software
engineers. This is because the types of data are drastically different company-to-company and
industry-to-industry. You won’t be working with the same types of data at Facebook than you
would at Salesforce so if you were interviewing at Facebook, wouldn’t you want to prepare with
relevant data science questions? Even the type of data science questions Airbnb would ask is
drastically different than the type of data science questions Google would ask despite both being
in Tech. Being able to parse through these differences is critical for you to best prepare for your
next data science coding interviews.

Video Solutions

Modern times call for modern solutions -- the trend for this generation is to learn via video. Video
is more easily consumable than text but much more time consuming to create. StrataScratch has
over 50+ video solutions on their platform to help you prepare for your data science interviews.

Python and SQL For Each Data Science Question

A data scientist has many tools in their tool belt. SQL is almost always required but many data
scientists are more comfortable with Python. Most data science interviews allow you to use any
language you want so as to give you the best chance to showcase your skills. StrataScratch
allows you to solve their data science questions in both SQL and python with solutions for both
coding languages.

Other Similar Features To LeetCode

LeetCode has a great feature-rich platform that helps software engineers prepare for interviews.
As such, it’s not surprising that similar features would be available for data scientists on
StrataScratch that helps to prepare for data science interviews.

The ability to explore other user’s solutions and learn alternative approaches is a major advantage
to succeeding on data science interviews.

The ability to also discuss and ask data science questions about each interview question and your
code with the StrataScratch community is another big beneFt. You’ll learn faster with other people
by your side than by yourself. Not only do you get help from the user community but also from the
StrataScratch team.

Also, check out our post where we put three interview preparation platforms up against each other
in the battle of LeetCode vs HackerRank vs StrataScratch for Data Science.

Conclusion

LeetCode is a great platform to help software engineers prepare for the interviews. They have over
1800+ algorithm type questions to help you improve your technical skills. However, LeetCode is
not focused on the data scientists and their needs. This is apparent from having only 150
database type questions. Do you believe LeetCode is for data science interview preparation? I
used LeetCode many times to prepare for my data science interviews but really only used them at
the start of preparation. These days there are many other resources out there that focus on data
science.

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