Leadership reports often drive decisions, so a small SQL mistake can create a large business problem. Interviewers ask this to see whether you have a disciplined process for validating query outputs, not just writing queries.
Explain the steps you take to verify the accuracy of a report before presenting it to leadership. In your answer, cover how you validate source data, confirm business logic, test filters and aggregations, and check for edge cases such as nulls, duplicates, or missing records.
Keep the answer practical and SQL-focused. The interviewer expects a structured validation approach: how you compare results to known baselines, how you sanity-check totals and row counts, and how you make sure the final output matches the metric definition and reporting period.