Advanced SQL for Ranking | Dataford Interview Questions

Hinge’s analytics team wants to review the first employees associated with each product project in alphabetical order. Write a PostgreSQL query that returns the top two employees per project based on last name and then first name.

Requirements

Join employees_projects to employees using employee_id.
Rank employees independently within each project_id using ROW_NUMBER().
Sort alphabetically by last_name, then first_name, with employee_id as a deterministic tie-breaker.
Treat null names as appearing after non-null names, remove null employee mappings, and return no more than two employees per project.
Prevent duplicate employee-project mappings from producing duplicate output rows.
Order the final result by project and alphabetical position.

Schema

employees

Column	Type	Description
employee_idPK	INTEGER	Unique employee identifier
last_name	VARCHAR(80)	Employee surname
first_name	VARCHAR(80)	Employee given name
salary	NUMERIC(12,2)	Annual employee salary
department	VARCHAR(80)	Hinge department

employees_projects

Column	Type	Description
employee_id	INTEGER	Employee associated with the project
project_id	INTEGER	Hinge project identifier

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Problem