I interviewed for Lowe's last week.

There were a total of 5 rounds: 3 technical, 1 manager, and followed with the DM.

Every round was about 1 hour.

My first technical round was more like rapid-fire questions on Informatica and Unix. The second technical round was quite difficult, focusing on detailed and complex scenarios in Informatica. The third technical round was very difficult.

The interview started at 9 am, and I was done with all rounds by 4 pm.

They provided lunch, which was really nice.

SQL queries:

• Extract second highest salary.
• Extract employee names who are earning more than the average salary in their department.
• Remove duplicates.
• Swap the values in the gender column (male to female, vice versa).
• What's the highest value output of decimal(9,2)?
• Questions on all types of joins.

Informatica:

• Which transformation uses 'ORDER BY' by default?
• Can an update strategy work without a primary key?
• When to use cached and uncached look-up?
• To extract distinct values from a flat file source.
• SCD types.
• How to read files whose suffix changes on a daily basis?
• What is a target load plan?
• How to ensure one target loads first when you have two targets in a mapping flow?
• Aggregate transformation.
• Difference between Union and Union All.
• Mapping parameter vs. mapping variable.
• How to discard the previous date load and load only the current date load from the source.
• How to remove header and footer from a file.
• Parameter file formats.
• How to stop a workflow without stop and abort.
• How to load data in multiple targets in a cyclic order.

Some puzzles and basics on Unix.