SQL Quest › SQL Interview Questions › Conditional Logic
Ticket-Size Mix by Category
Pivot the ledger into spend segments. A dataset question on a card screen often wants one row per category with the transaction mix across amount buckets as COLUMNS — that is conditional aggregation: SUM(CASE WHEN ... THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) once per bucket. Buckets: small below 25, mid from 25 up to but not including 100, large 100 and above.
Return category, small_txns, mid_txns, large_txns, and total_txns (COUNT of all transactions in the category). Order by total_txns descending, then category ascending.
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Schema
transactions
| txn_id | account_id | amount | txn_at | merchant_id | lat | lng | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 149 | 151.84 | 2026-03-04T12:39:39.078Z | 24 | 40.342 | -74.4092 | completed |
| 2 | 21 | 10.72 | 2026-03-04T13:04:50.641Z | 7 | 52.9366 | 13.3229 | completed |
| 3 | 35 | 158.78 | 2026-03-04T13:27:15.528Z | 25 | 52.7397 | 13.3134 | completed |
merchants
| merchant_id | name | category | country | risk_tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BigBox Mart | Grocery | TR | high |
| 2 | Quick Stop | Electronics | JP | high |
| 3 | Aurora Cafe | Travel | TR | high |
Expected output: Clothing 26 132 289 447, Travel 28 101 244 373 ...
Hint
Concepts
SELECT CASE JOIN GROUP BY SUM Pivot / Conditional Aggregation
Practise the topic: SQL practice questions · CASE WHEN practice · JOIN practice · GROUP BY exercises
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