MediumJoins

Operating Room Surgical Procedure Staffing Matrix

Frequently Asked By:AppleGoogleAmazon

Interactive In-Browser Workspace

Practice this problem on live schema tables in PostgreSQL 16 WASM with instant row verification and visual EXPLAIN plans.

Solve in Workbench

Problem Statement

Join `surgical_cases` with `operating_suites` on `suite_id` and with `surgeons` on `surgeon_id`. Return: 1. `c.case_id` 2. `s.surgeon_name` 3. `s.specialty` 4. `o.suite_name` 5. `c.scheduled_hours` Order results by `c.scheduled_hours` descending, then by `c.case_id` ascending.

Why Technical Interviewers Ask This

Hospital operating room directors track scheduled surgical operations by linking cases to the assigned surgical theater room and the lead surgeon.

Common Pitfalls & Interview Traps

Forgetting required sorting and deterministic tie-breaking.

Not accounting for NULL or zero-value denominators during calculations.

Using inefficient quadratic subqueries instead of single-pass joins constructs.

Canonical Modern SQL Solution

PostgreSQL 16 / ANSI SQL

SELECT 
        c.case_id,
        s.surgeon_name,
        s.specialty,
        o.suite_name,
        c.scheduled_hours
      FROM surgical_cases c
      INNER JOIN operating_suites o ON c.suite_id = o.suite_id
      INNER JOIN surgeons s ON c.surgeon_id = s.surgeon_id
      ORDER BY c.scheduled_hours DESC, c.case_id ASC;

Approach Breakdown

This query addresses the problem requirements by filtering and structuring data in Joins. It meets the target criteria: Operating room surgical schedule cross-referencing room and attending surgeon.

Edge Cases to Verbally Clarify with Your Interviewer

The dataset contains zero matching records (must return valid empty result without crashing).

Multiple records tie on sorting criteria (must evaluate tie-breaking order deterministically).

Foreign keys or secondary attributes have NULL values.

Frequently Asked Follow-Up Questions

What makes this question a favorite among Apple and Google interviewers?

Interviewers use this problem to test whether candidates write defensive, scalable Joins queries that run efficiently on multi-million row production databases without excessive memory usage.

How does the query optimizer execute this query?

Using single-pass table scans with index lookups or sort buffers. Running EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) in the DB Exercises workbench visualizes the execution nodes and buffer hit cache.