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9 PVH Corp SQL Interview Questions (Updated 2024)

Updated on

June 30, 2024

PVH Corp employees use SQL daily for trend prediction, and managing customer databases for targeted marketing campaigns. For this reason PVH Corp often tests SQL coding questions in interviews for Data Analyst, Data Science, and BI jobs.

Thus, to help you practice, here’s 9 PVH Corp SQL interview questions – able to answer them all?

PVH Corp SQL Interview Questions

9 PVH Corp SQL Interview Questions

SQL Question 1: Calculate the monthly sales for each product

PVH Corp. is a global apparel company, owning brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, and many others. A common query might involve analyzing the monthly sales of their different products over a period of time. You are given a dataset containing the sales transactions. Write a SQL query to calculate the total sales per month for each product using window functions. Assume that every transaction in the dataset is completed.

Suppose you have the following table:

Example Input:
transaction_idproducttransaction_dateamount
101Calvin Klein Shirt05/01/202260
102Calvin Klein Jeans05/01/2022100
103Tommy Hilfiger Shirt05/02/202250
104Tommy Hilfiger Jeans05/03/2022100
105Calvin Klein Shirt06/04/202260
106Tommy Hilfiger Shirt06/11/202250
107Tommy Hilfiger Jeans06/12/2022100
108Calvin Klein Jeans07/01/2022100

The output should return the total monthly sales for each product.

Answer:


This query partitions the data by product and month, then sums up the sales amount from the beginning of each partition. This provides a rolling sum of sales for each product in each month. The window specification is necessary to perform the cumulative sum in the correct order. EXTRACT is used to get the month part of the transaction_date.

Example Output:
productmonthtotal_sales_monthly
Calvin Klein Shirt560
Calvin Klein Shirt660
Calvin Klein Jeans5100
Calvin Klein Jeans7100
Tommy Hilfiger Shirt550
Tommy Hilfiger Shirt650
Tommy Hilfiger Jeans5100
Tommy Hilfiger Jeans6100

Pro Tip: Window functions are a popular SQL interview topic, so practice all the window function problems on DataLemur

SQL Interview Questions on DataLemur

SQL Question 2: Highly-Paid Employees

Assume there was a table of PVH Corp employee salary data. Write a SQL query to find all employees who earn more than their direct manager.

PVH Corp Example Input:

employee_idnamesalarydepartment_idmanager_id
1Emma Thompson38001
2Daniel Rodriguez2230110
3Olivia Smith800018
4Noah Johnson680028
5Sophia Martinez1750110
8William Davis70002NULL
10James Anderson40001NULL

Example Output:

employee_idemployee_name
3Olivia Smith

This is the output because Olivia Smith earns $8,000, surpassing her manager, William Davis who earns 7,800.

Test your SQL query for this problem interactively on DataLemur:

Employees Earning More Than Their Manager

Answer:

First, we perform a SELF-JOIN where we treat the first table () as the managers' table and the second table () as the employees' table. Then we use a clause to filter the results, ensuring we only get employees whose salaries are higher than their manager's salary.


If the solution above is confusing, you can find a step-by-step solution here: Employees Earning More Than Managers.

SQL Question 3: What's a foreign key?

A foreign key is a column or group of columns in a table that refers to the primary key in another table. The foreign key constraint helps maintain referential integrity between the two tables.

For example, let's look at the PVH Corp sales database:

pvh_corp_sales:

+------------+------------+------------+------------+ | order_id | product_id | customer_id| quantity | +------------+------------+------------+------------+ | 1 | 222 | 1 | 2 | | 2 | 333 | 1 | 1 | | 3 | 444 | 2 | 3 | | 4 | 555 | 3 | 1 | +------------+------------+------------+------------+

In this table, and could both be foreign keys. They reference the primary keys of other tables, such as a Products table and a Customers table, respectively. This establishes a relationship between the table and the other tables, such that each row in the sales database corresponds to a specific product and a specific customer.

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PVH Corp SQL Interview Questions

SQL Question 4: Calculate the Average Sale Price Per Brand in PVH Corp for a Given Year.

PVH Corp is a global company that owns brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Van Heusen, IZOD, and Arrow. As an SQL developer at PVH Corp, you are given a task to write a query that returns the average price of all sold items per brand during the year 2021. Your result should consist of each brand and its corresponding average price in descending order.

Depending on the structure of the database, we'll assume there are two main tables and .

Example Input
sale_iditem_idbrand_idsale_datesale_price
100110101/04/202150.00
100220202/05/2021150.00
100330103/14/202170.00
100440204/18/2021180.00
100550105/25/202160.00
Table
brand_idbrand_name
1Tommy Hilfiger
2Calvin Klein

Your output should be:

Example Output
brand_nameavg_sale_price
Calvin Klein165.00
Tommy Hilfiger60.00

Answer:


This query joins the and tables on the column to allow for brand names to be included in the output. It filters the sales data to include only the sales from the year 2021 using the WHERE clause with the condition. Then, for each brand it uses the AVG function to calculate the average sale price. Finally, results are ordered in descending order by the average sale price.

To practice a very similar question try this interactive Amazon Highest-Grossing Items Question which is similar for calculating metrics for specific categories in descending order or this Wayfair Y-on-Y Growth Rate Question which is similar for calculating yearly aggregation values.

SQL Question 5: What are the ACID properties in a DBMS?

A DBMS (database management system), in order to ensure transactions are relaible and don't ruin the integrity of the data, tries to mantain the following ACID properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.

To make this concept more concrete, here is what each of the ACID properties would mean in the context of banking transactions:

  • Atomicity: a transaction is either completed fully, or not complete at all. For example, if a customer is transferring money from one account to another, the transaction should either transfer the full amount or none at all.
  • Consistency: a transaction will only be completed if it follows all database constraints and checks. For example, if a customer is withdrawing money from an account, the transaction should only be completed if the account has sufficient funds available, otherwise the transaction is rejected
  • Isolation: ensures that concurrent transactions are isolated from each other, so that the changes made by one transaction cannot be seen by another transaction. This isolation prevents race conditions, like two customers trying to withdraw money from the same account at the same time.
  • Durability: ensures that once a transaction has been committed and completed, the changes are permanent. A reset / shutdown of the database shouldn't erase someone's savings accounts!

SQL Question 6: Click-Through-Rate Analysis for PVH Corp.

PVH Corp., as a global leader in various segments of the apparel industry, makes extensive use of digital marketing. They are analysing the effectiveness of these digital marketing advertisements. In particular, they want to understand the click-through rate that is brought by these ads.

For a given week, the marketing team gathers data on the unique views of an ad (how many unique users saw the ad), and how many of those views resulted in a click (the user clicked on the ad, leading them to the PVH Corp. product website). They want a SQL query to easily determine the click-through rate, calculated as (number of unique clicks / number of unique views) * 100% for each ad.

Sample data
ad_ideventuser_idevent_time
100view12307/25/2022 14:00:00
100click12307/25/2022 14:01:00
100view45607/25/2022 14:05:00
200view78907/25/2022 15:00:00
200click78907/25/2022 15:01:00
200view32107/25/2022 15:05:00
200view32107/25/2022 15:06:00
200click32107/25/2022 15:07:00

Answer:


This query first counts the unique user IDs for each ad where the event was 'click' and 'view'. Then, it calculates the click-through rate by dividing the count of unique 'click' user IDs by the unique 'view' user IDs and multiplying it by 100 to turn it into a percentage. The ROUND function is used to limit the result to two decimal places. The results are grouped by ad_id to provide click-through rates for each ad.

To practice a similar SQL problem on DataLemur's free interactive coding environment, try this SQL interview question asked by Facebook: Facebook Click-through-rate SQL Question

SQL Question 7: Can you explain the distinction between cross join and natural join?

A cross join is a type of JOIN operation in SQL that creates a new table by combining each row from the first table with every row from the second table. It is also known as a cartesian join.

For example, say you worked on the Marketing Analytics team at PVH Corp, and needed to understand what advertising copy (text) goes best with what advertising creative (the photo that gets posted with the advertisement copy).

Here is an example of a cross-join between a table of ad_copy and a table of ad_creative:


A natural join, on the other hand, is a type of JOIN that combines rows from two or more tables based on their common columns. It is called a "natural" join because it is based on the natural relationship that exists between the common columns in the tables being joined.

For an example of each one, say you had sales data exported from PVH Corp's Salesforce CRM stored in a datawarehouse which had two tables: and .

An (which is a type of natural join) combines the two tables on the common


This query will return rows from the sales and tables that have matching customer id values. Only rows with matching values will be included in the results.

One main difference between cross joins and natural joins is that cross joins do not require any common columns between the tables being joined, while natural joins do. Another difference is that cross joins can create very large tables if the input tables have a large number of rows, while natural joins will only return a table with the number of rows equal to the number of matching rows in the input tables.

SQL Question 8: Find Customers From NYC

PVH Corp, a leading fashion and lifestyle company, uses a database to store its customer information. They want to keep track of their customer base in New York City for a marketing campaign. Could you write down an SQL query to find all customers whose is 'New York City' and contains the word 'Street'?

Here's some sample customer data for the context:

Example Input:
customer_idfirst_namelast_nameaddresscitystateemail
101JohnDoe1234 Broadway StNew York CityNYjohn.doe@example.com
102JaneSmith5678 Main StreetLos AngelesCAjane.smith@example.com
103RobertJohnson91011 Wall StreetNew York CityNYrobert.johnson@example.com
104EmilyMiller1213 Court StreetChicagoILemily.miller@example.com
105AlexandraBrown1415 Carew StreetFort WayneINalexandra.brown@example.com

Answer:

Here's the SQL query to solve the problem:


I used a combination of exact match condition with clause and a LIKE clause . LIKE clause combined with '%Street%' will match any customers whose address contains 'Street'. These customers will be from 'New York City' and whose addresses contain the word 'Street'.

SQL Question 9: Customer Purchases and Product Information Analysis

As a data analyst at PVH Corp, you are tasked with analyzing the company's customer purchase history. Your objective is to create a SQL query that retrieves the list of all the customers along with their respective total spending and the most expensive product they have bought. To accomplish this, you need to join two tables: table and table.

The table has the following fields:

  • : The unique ID assigned to each customer.
  • : The name of the customer.
  • : The IDs of the purchases made by the customer.
  • : The IDs of the products bought in each purchase.
customer_idcustomer_namepurchase_idproduct_id
1John Doe101201
2Jane Smith102202
1John Doe103203
3Alice Johnson104204
2Jane Smith105205

The table has the following fields:

  • : The unique ID assigned to each product.
  • : The name of the product.
  • : The price of the product.
product_idproduct_nameprice
201T-shirt$20
202Jeans$50
203Shirt$30
204Skirt$40
205Jacket$100

Answer:

You'd use a SQL query such as the below to solve this:


This query works by joining the and tables based on the field. It then groups the records by and . For each group (which represents a single customer), it sums up the price of the products they bought to find the total spending. It also finds the maximum product price within the group, which gives us the price of the most expensive product they bought. Finally, it orders the results by total spending in descending order.

Since joins come up routinely during SQL interviews, take a stab at this Snapchat SQL Interview question using JOINS: Snapchat Join SQL question

Also read their "We are PVH" Statement to help you understand the brand even better!

Preparing For The PVH Corp SQL Interview

The key to acing a PVH Corp SQL interview is to practice, practice, and then practice some more! In addition to solving the above PVH Corp SQL interview questions, you should also solve the 200+ tricky sql questions on DataLemur which come from companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and tech startups. DataLemur Questions

Each SQL question has multiple hints, step-by-step solutions and crucially, there's an interactive SQL code editor so you can right in the browser run your SQL query answer and have it executed.

To prep for the PVH Corp SQL interview you can also be useful to practice SQL questions from other apparel companies like:

In case your SQL skills are weak, don't worry about going right into solving questions – go learn SQL with this free SQL tutorial.

SQL tutorial for Data Analytics

This tutorial covers things like creating summary stats with GROUP BY and LAG window function – both of which come up routinely in PVH Corp SQL interviews.

PVH Corp Data Science Interview Tips

What Do PVH Corp Data Science Interviews Cover?

In addition to SQL interview questions, the other topics to practice for the PVH Corp Data Science Interview include:

  • AB Testing Questions
  • Python Pandas or R Coding Questions
  • Product Data Science Interview Questions
  • Machine Learning and Predictive Modeling Questions
  • Behavioral Based Interview Questions

PVH Corp Data Scientist

How To Prepare for PVH Corp Data Science Interviews?

To prepare for PVH Corp Data Science interviews read the book Ace the Data Science Interview because it's got:

  • 201 interview questions taken from tech companies like Google & Microsoft
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