How do you handle date/time analysis in SQL (truncation, intervals, time zones)?
Time-based analysis runs through all of analytics, and time zones and bucketing are the usual traps. The signal is DATE_TRUNC for bucketing, interval math, and storing UTC.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Time-based analysis runs through all of analytics, and time zones and bucketing are the usual traps. The signal is DATE_TRUNC for bucketing, interval math, and storing UTC.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
