Data Warehousing questionnaire

1. What are the goals of data warehouse bus architecture?

Ans: a) To produce the master suite of conformed dimensions
b) To standardize the definitions of facts
2. What are the types of cardinality?
Ans: a) One-to-one
b) One-to-many
c) Many-to-one
3. What is a Surrogate Key?
Ans: a) An alternate key used to uniquely identify a dimension record
b) It is always a numeric key, used to resolve the different types of codes from different source
systems
4. What is denormalization?
Ans: a) Denormalization is combining or collapsing the number of logical objects in the model
b) Denormalization will shorten application call paths that traverse the database objects when the
structure is transformed from logical to physical
5. What is the difference between a dependent data mart and an independent data mart?
Ans: A dependent data mart is fed from the data warehouse; an independent data mart is fed directly
from the legacy application environment
6. Where is a star join much more likely to be found - in a data warehouse or in a data mart?
Ans: Data Mart
7. Would you expect to find more indexes in a data warehouse or a data mart?
Ans: Data Mart
8. Would you expect to find more volume of data in a data warehouse or a data mart?
Ans: Data Warehouse
9. Is a classical waterfall development methodology applicable to warehouse development?
Ans: Not Applicable
10. What is the difference between the granularity of data and detailed data in the data warehouse?
Ans: Nothing, they are the same

11. What is the difference between normalized design and multi dimensional design?
Ans: multi dimensional design is highly denormalized
12. What is a Fact less Fact table?
Ans: It contains no measure
13. What is cardinality?
Ans: An indication of how many occurrences of one entity in a relationship can be linked to a single
occurrence of the other entity in the relationship
14. What are the different approaches to build a Data Warehouse?
Ans: a) Top-Down
b) Bottom-Up
c) Parallel
15. Can the granularity of an individual dimension be lower than the overall fact granularity?
Ans: No
16. Is Junk dimension same as degenerate dimension?
Ans: No
17. What is a degenerate dimension?
Ans: A degenerate dimension is in the fact table with no joins to anything
18. If data is loaded into a data warehouse perfectly with no errors, why does it need to be periodically
audited and altered?
Ans: because business conditions change over time
19. How long is data kept in a data warehouse?
Ans: as long as it is useful
20. Can statistical analysis be done against the data warehouse?
Ans: Yes, on a limited basis
21. Where will you keep unrelated flags and text attributes in a data warehouse?
Ans: In a new dimension table
22. Explain type 1, type 2 and type 3 Slowly Changing Dimensions.
23. How will you handle changes to a rapidly changing dimension?

Ans: Insert a new record with the new dimension values

24. What kind of relationship a fact table represents?
Ans: many-to-many relationship
25. What is data staging area?
Ans: The data staging area is the source of the most atomic transactional data
Data staging area may be the best place to hold data for emergency recovery operation
Data staging area is really an assembly plant and is not intended to be seen by users
26. Where are conformed dimensions created?
Ans: Data staging area.
27. Which feature of Data warehouse bus architecture allows you to integrate data marts?
Ans: Conformed dimension
28. Why do you think that the atomic data mart should be relational rather than OLAP?
Ans: Extreme level of detail
The number and size of dimension
The broad acceptability relational databases provide
29. In the case of incremental load how do you determine the records that have changed since the last
load?
Ans: Indicator flag in the source system
Transaction data
Date of the last load
30. How will you handle data sources where history could be changed by the transaction system
without leaving any identification marks?
Ans: Pull the whole table over on a regular basis
31. What steps are involved in integrating multiple source system?
Ans: Generating surrogate keys.
Mapping keys from one system to another
Mapping codes into full description
32. How do you check referential integrity during a data warehouse load process?
Ans: RI can be managed by the Load process
33. Name two factors that will affect Data warehouse load performance.

Ans: Enforce referential integrity constraints with the database

Logging during loads
34. How do you extract metadata from an existing database?
Ans: Using reverse engineering
35. What will you get if you normalize the entire star schema?
Ans: Third Normal form
36. What is the nature of Ad-hoc Queries?
Ans: a) Unpredictable in their processing
b) Involve full table scans
37. What is a variant of star schema where each dimension can have its own dimension table called?
Answer: snowflake schema
38. How would you partition a fact table?
Answer: Based on the refresh cycle
39. What are the goals of a good aggregation strategy?
Ans: a) Provide dramatic performance gains for as many categories of user queries as possible
b) Be completely transparent to end users and no application designers except for the obvious
performance benefits
c) Directly benefit all users of the data warehouse, regardless of which query tool you use
40. What are the disadvantages of building aggregates inside the DBMS using SQL after the granular
data has been loaded?
Answer: a) Aggregate building may be faster outside the DBMS with a dedicated sort package than
inside the DBMS using the ORDER BY clause in SQL
b) Aggregate building should be sequential processing, not relational processing
41. What are the functions of query reformulation service?
Ans: Generate complex SQL.
Multipass SQL
Query retargeting
42. What are the advantages of using multi-pass SQL?
Ans: a) Using multi-pass SQL the Query tool combines the result of the separate queries in an
intelligent way.
b) Multi-pass SQL also allows drilling across to different fact sales in several conformed data
marts.

43. What happens to the aggregate navigator when a particular aggregate table is not present?
Answer: Aggregate navigator runs if they are not present
44. What is a soft data model change?
Ans: a) Adding a new object class
b) Changing the external name, visibility, or default value
c) Making any change to a logical field
45. What is a hard data model change?
Ans: a) Changing the name of an object class
b) Adding a new physical field
c) Changing the name, field type, or key status of a physical field
46. What is the need of Mini-dimensions?
Ans: Maintenance of changes would be easier and performance would improve