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Beginner

10h

Updated 3 months ago

SSIS Interview Questions

Solve real SSIS interview questions that mirror the challenges faced in data engineering and ETL delivery.
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Overview
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When you're interviewing for an SSIS-heavy role, you're not just being tested on your ability to configure data flows—you’re being evaluated on how you handle edge cases, prevent data loss, and streamline operations in high-stakes environments. These questions are built around the kinds of workflow, integration, and transformation logic that surface during real SSIS interviews. You’ll explore practical questions that deal with malformed input data, broken joins, dependency failures, and slow transformations. You'll encounter exercises that push you to think about data lineage, error handling frameworks, and deployment planning from the perspective of someone responsible for production ETL health. These scenarios are drawn from interview patterns used by teams hiring SSIS developers, data platform engineers, and BI professionals. They're designed to build judgment, not just technical fluency.
When you're interviewing for an SSIS-heavy role, you're not just being tested on your ability to configure data flows—you’re bei...Show More

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

Structuring resilient ETL packages using control flow and data flow components.
Designing load strategies for real-world use cases: CDC, partitioned loads, backfills, and dimensional modeling.
Debugging failed executions with event handlers, checkpoints, and logging mechanisms.
Using package configurations, environment variables, and deployment best practices in SSISDB.
Communicating how you design for fault tolerance, reusability, and runtime performance under SLA constraints.
Structuring resilient ETL packages using control flow and data flow components.

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Content

2.

Two Pointers

38 Lessons

3.

Fast and Slow Pointers

21 Lessons

4.

Sliding Window

31 Lessons

5.

Intervals

18 Lessons

6.

In-Place Manipulation of a Linked List

24 Lessons

7.

Heaps

25 Lessons

8.

K-way merge

15 Lessons

9.

Top K Elements

37 Lessons

10.

Modified Binary Search

32 Lessons

11.

Subsets

14 Lessons

12.

Greedy Techniques

31 Lessons

13.

Backtracking

33 Lessons

14.

Dynamic Programming

36 Lessons

15.

Cyclic Sort

12 Lessons

16.

Topological Sort

18 Lessons

17.

Sort and Search

31 Lessons

18.

Matrices

35 Lessons

19.

Stacks

28 Lessons

20.

Graphs

31 Lessons

21.

Tree Depth-First Search

35 Lessons

22.

Tree Breadth-First Search

24 Lessons

23.

Trie

28 Lessons

24.

Hash Maps

38 Lessons

25.

Knowing What to Track

30 Lessons

26.

Union Find

28 Lessons

27.

Custom Data Structures

32 Lessons

28.

Bitwise Manipulation

30 Lessons

29.

Math and Geometry

37 Lessons

30.

Challenge Yourself

40 Lessons

31.

Conclusion

1 Lessons

Certificate of Completion
Showcase your accomplishment by sharing your certificate of completion.
Developed by MAANG Engineers
Every Educative lesson is designed by a team of ex-MAANG software engineers and PhD computer science educators, and developed in consultation with developers and data scientists working at Meta, Google, and more. Our mission is to get you hands-on with the necessary skills to stay ahead in a constantly changing industry. No video, no fluff. Just interactive, project-based learning with personalized feedback that adapts to your goals and experience.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are common pitfalls that sink SSIS interviews?

Here are some common pitfalls in SSIS interviews:

  • Using blocking transforms casually on big data.
  • Row-by-row updates instead of set-based SQL.
  • Storing secrets inside packages.
  • No plan for restartability/idempotency.
  • Overlooking environment-specific configs and CI/CD.

How should I talk about CI/CD for an SSIS interview?

Version control the project, build an .ispac artifact, deploy to SSISDB via script/DevOps pipeline, bind environments per stage, and automate smoke runs + rollback. Keep parameters and secrets externalized.

What’s a senior-level scenario you might get asked in SSIS interviews?

You receive hourly CSVs with late-arriving updates and no reliable timestamp. Design an SSIS solution that deduplicates, handles late arrivals, and supports restartability. Justify your hashing/watermark strategy, quarantine design, and how you’d prove idempotency.

What topics usually come up in an SSIS interview?

Interviewers often start with your practical experience—what types of packages you’ve built, how complex they were, and the challenges you’ve solved. From there, they’ll explore package structure, data flow and control flow, deployment methods, and common troubleshooting steps. For more advanced roles, they may dive into performance tuning and real-world ETL scenarios.

Will I face scenario-based problems during the SSIS interview?

Yes, most SSIS interviews include practical scenarios. You could be asked to design an incremental load, configure a Lookup transformation, or combine datasets using Merge or Union All. The goal is to see how you apply SSIS concepts in real situations.

Do I need programming knowledge for SSIS interviews?

While junior positions might not require heavy coding, knowing C# or VB for scripting tasks is a big plus. You should understand when to use a Script Task versus a Script Component and how they fit into the ETL process.

How should I prepare for an SSIS interview?

Review core SSIS concepts, practise building and deploying packages, and brush up on real-world troubleshooting. If you have access, work through sample projects that test data transformations, error handling, and deployment strategies.