Dealing with Unstructured Data | Dataford Interview Questions

Tell me a time you had to deal with unstructured data?

For this SQL exercise, use the supplied transaction payloads and source labels. Write a query that extracts customer references, normalizes monetary values, parses supported date formats, and retains only usable transactions from 2025 onward.

Output

One row per retained transaction with record_id, source_label, customer_reference, transaction_date, and amount.
Ignore rows with a NULL customer reference, amount, or transaction date.
Sort by record_id ascending.

Schema

raw_transactions

Column	Type	Description
record_idPK	INT	Unique raw transaction identifier
source_system	VARCHAR(40)	System that supplied the payload
raw_payload	TEXT	Transaction attributes stored as JSON text

source_dictionary

Column	Type	Description
source_systemPK	VARCHAR(40)	Source system code
source_label	VARCHAR(80)	Readable source system label

Your question is Dealing with Unstructured Data. Start with the requirements and the two tables in the Question tab.

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Problem