Movie Rating
A medium-tier problem at 42% community acceptance, tagged with Database. Reported in interviews at SAP and 1 others.
Movie Rating is a database problem that sits at the intersection of SQL joins, aggregation, and sorting. SAP and Snap both ask it. The acceptance rate is 41%, which means it's not a gimme but not a trick question either. The problem usually asks you to rank movies or users by some derived metric, and the trap is in how you handle nulls, ties, and the join logic when combining data from multiple tables. If you can nail the GROUP BY and ORDER BY clauses without overthinking it, you're ahead of most candidates who freeze on the exact syntax or miss an edge case during the live assessment.
Companies that ask "Movie Rating"
Movie Rating is the kind of problem that decides whether you pass. StealthCoder reads the problem on screen and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Invisible to screen share. The proctor sees nothing. Made by a working Amazon engineer who got tired of watching qualified friends bomb OAs they'd solve cold in an IDE.
Get StealthCoderThe core pattern here is aggregating ratings across a table, then ranking the result. Most candidates write the join correctly but fail on the ordering or miss that you need to handle both movies with ratings and those without. The obvious approach of a simple join can drop rows entirely if you're not careful with LEFT JOIN versus INNER JOIN. The actual trick is understanding when to aggregate before joining versus after, and how NULLs behave in your specific database engine. StealthCoder becomes your safety net if you hit the assessment and blank on whether you need a subquery or a window function to rank properly. The problem tests whether you think about data completeness, not just correctness on the happy path.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Movie Rating recycles across companies for a reason. It's medium-tier, and most candidates blank under the timer. StealthCoder is the hedge: an AI overlay invisible during screen share. It reads the problem and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Made by a working Amazon engineer who got tired of watching qualified friends bomb OAs they'd solve cold in an IDE. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Movie Rating interview FAQ
Is Movie Rating still actively asked at SAP and Snap?+
Yes. Both companies have asked it. With a 41% acceptance rate and medium difficulty, it's a solid mid-tier screening problem, not a warm-up and not a final-round crusher. It's the kind of thing that shows up in their online assessments fairly regularly.
What's the most common mistake on this problem?+
Using INNER JOIN when you should use LEFT JOIN, which silently drops movies or users that have no ratings. Then you fail test cases and don't understand why. The second trap is forgetting to sort correctly when there are ties in the rating or count metric.
Do I need a window function or subquery?+
Depends on what you're asked to rank. If you're ranking within a group, a window function is cleaner. If you're ranking globally, GROUP BY with ORDER BY usually works. You won't know until you read the exact requirement, so don't assume the pattern before you parse the problem statement.
How does Movie Rating relate to broader database interview prep?+
It's a checkpoint for GROUP BY, JOIN, ORDER BY, and NULL handling. Master this and you can handle most mid-tier SQL problems. It's not about complex window functions or recursive queries, just solid fundamentals applied with attention to edge cases.
How much time should I spend on this during an assessment?+
If you know SQL well, 8 to 12 minutes to write and test. If you're less confident, 15 to 20 minutes is reasonable. Don't get stuck on syntax; if the logic is right, run it and debug against test cases rather than rewriting from scratch.
Want the actual problem statement? View "Movie Rating" on LeetCode →