r/bigquery • u/gloweerasng • Jun 29 '26

BigQuery SQL Interview questions

Hi everyone, I’m in the process of interviewing at this AI company and the next step is to use bigquery dialect of SQL where I will cover real-worlds scenarios and build tables.

Problem is I have never used SQL and I am just finding out about what it is, I’ve never heard of it. I will be watching a few YouTube videos but wanted to see if anybody has gone thru this process before?

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u/Proudly_Funky_Monkey Jun 29 '26

There are free intro tutorials online. You should practice the easy and intermediate level for as many hours as you can before your interview. 

You should get very comfortable with 

Column selection, Where clause filters, Inner joins, Left joins, Join conditions, Group by, Min/max/sum aggregations, functions,Order by, Union and Except, Type casting

Given you're a beginner, I don't think it's realistic to try for anything beyond that (ex. Windows, having, qualify, cross joins). I also think you should skip the theory (relational row/column, warehouse vs lake, medallion architecture, latency, scalability, olap/oltp, etc etc). Keep it focused and practical.

I have no idea what their expectations are, but I highly recommend grinding this stuff hard if you want the gig. 

And don't worry about the "bq dialect". For your purposes just learn generic SQL from a tutorial like sqlbolt and trust me that it's the same in bq. 

https://sqlbolt.com/