Problem 2:

Total no. of courses: 500 unique Crs_Sec_ID Total no. of students: 40 per course*500 courses = 20,000 Assuming students take 5 courses per period, we have 20,000/5=4000 unique student_ID. Total no. of professors: 200(assumption) unique Professor_ID Total no. of periods: 30 semesters Assuming grain of fact table as semester Total rows = 500*4000*200*30=12*10^9 Each Fact table row has 5 fields and each field is 5 bytes. Total size= 12*10^9*5*5=300*10^9 i.e. 300 GB!!!

Ans d is not in syllabus. Basically when characteristics of dimensions change, we can overwrite the new vlue over the old but this makes us lose historical data if the changes are not that frequent. For such changes that happen in long time, we can add two more attributes in dimensions- start and end date to denote time period for which the details are valid. There is a date key, along with dimension key in the fact table. This date key is used to fetch that row of dimension for which it lies between start and end date.