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Same-Year Hires in Same Department (Self Join)
An onboarding analyst wants to identify employees who joined the same department in the same year — natural peer cohorts for ramp comparisons. Use a self join.
Show emp_a, emp_b, department, hire_year. Each pair should appear once (not mirrored) — use e1.emp_id < e2.emp_id to enforce one-direction pairing. Order by hire_year, department, emp_a.
The < trick is the standard way to deduplicate pairs in a self join. Without it you'd get both (Alice, Bob) and (Bob, Alice) for every pair, which is twice the noise.
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Schema
employees
| emp_id | name | department | position | salary | hire_date | manager_id | performance_rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alice Johnson | Engineering | Senior Developer | 95000 | 2019-03-15 | 5 | 4.5 |
| 2 | Bob Smith | Engineering | Developer | 75000 | 2020-06-01 | 1 | 3.8 |
| 3 | Carol Williams | Marketing | Marketing Manager | 85000 | 2018-09-20 | NULL | 4.2 |
Expected output: Alice | Bob | Engineering | 2020
Hint
Concepts
SELECT JOIN Self Join Date Functions
Practise the topic: SQL practice questions · JOIN practice · Date function practice
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