I read this recently on Tom Kyte’s blog about three questions that he asks at interviews:

I have a table:

create table t ( …..,  month number, ….. );

Month is always a number between 1 and 12.

I ask three questions about this table:

1) how many rows are in the table

2) how many rows BY MONTH are in the table (i want to  know how many rows for month one, month two
and so on)

3) what MONTH has the most rows (and for a special bonus, tell me why this question is ambiguous)

At an interview for a role that I did at some stage, I was asked the following:

I have a table EMP with columns NAME, SALARY, DEPTNO.  How would you write a query to give me the top three earners in each department?

I’m not sure if I got the answer right, but I got the gig

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