Tell me about a time you worked with databases in a BA capacity (e.g., writing SQL queries, data validation). What was the real business problem you were solving, and what specific queries or checks did you design?

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VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

At my last company, our sales leadership didn’t trust the monthly pipeline report because Finance, Salesforce, and our data warehouse were all showing slightly different numbers. It was creating a 5–7% variance in forecast, which is huge at ~$80M annual pipeline.

I partnered with the data engineering team but owned the analysis. I pulled data directly from the warehouse using SQL to trace the discrepancies. For example, I wrote reconciliation queries like:

SELECT opp_id, amount, stage, updated_at FROM dwh.opportunities d
LEFT JOIN sf.opportunities s ON d.opp_id = s.id
WHERE d.amount \u003c\u003e s.amount OR d.stage \u003c\u003e s.stage;

I also built validation checks for null close_dates on Closed Won deals, duplicate opportunity IDs, and mismatched currencies. After we fixed the ETL mapping and enforced those checks, our forecast variance dropped to under 1% for three consecutive quarters.

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