Sounds like a dumb interview. Are you sure you want to work there? How can you do any of this if you have never used the libraries. Else it must be so simple a

Sounds like a dumb interview. Are you sure you want to work there? How can you do any of this if you have never used the libraries. Else it must be so simple and obvious (at least to the interviewer) that they think it is a no brainer. Likely they want you to unwind some loops and use some of Pandas Vectorized routines. But as this article states https://pythonspeed.com/articles/pandas-vectorization/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/pandas-vectorization/ that is not always easy to do. It takes a lot of work to get good performance. Improve SQL performance - which one? Mysql, Postgres, etc. Sounds like an interview designed by an engineer.