Register Or Sign-InTop 50 Data Warehousing Interview Questions with Answers
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- Category: Interview Questions
- Published on Wednesday, 28 April 2010 16:44
- Written by Akash Mitra
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This article attempts to explain the rudimentary concepts of data warehousing in the form of typical interview questions with their respective answers. After reading this article, you should gain good amount of knowledge on various concepts of data warehousing.
Let us begin with the most simplest questions first, we will gradually move towards more complex concepts later.
What is data warehouse?
A data warehouse is a electronic storage of an Organization's historical data for the purpose of analysis and reporting. According to Kimpball, a datawarehouse should be subject-oriented, non-volatile, integrated and time-variant.
Explanatory Note
Note here, Non-volatile means that the data once loaded in the warehouse will not get deleted later. Time-variant means the data will change with respect to time.
The above definition of the data warehousing is typically considered as "classical" definition. However, if you are interested, you may want to read the article - What is a data warehouse - A 101 guide to modern data warehousing - which opens up a broader definition of data warehousing.
What is the benefits of data warehouse?
A data warehouse helps to integrate data (see Data integration) and store them historically so that we can analyze different aspects of business including, performance analysis, trend, prediction etc. over a given time frame and use the result of our analysis to improve the efficiency of business processes.
Why Data Warehouse is used?
For a long time in the past and also even today, Data warehouses are built to facilitate reporting on different key business processes of an organization, known as KPI. Data warehouses also help to integrate data from different sources and show a single-point-of-truth values about the business measures.
Data warehouse can be further used for data mining which helps trend prediction, forecasts, pattern recognition etc. Check this article to know more about data mining
What is the difference between OLTP and OLAP?
OLTP is the transaction system that collects business data. Whereas OLAP is the reporting and analysis system on that data.
OLTP systems are optimized for INSERT, UPDATE operations and therefore highly normalized. On the other hand, OLAP systems are deliberately denormalized for fast data retrieval through SELECT operations.
Explanatory Note:
In a departmental shop, when we pay the prices at the check-out counter, the sales person at the counter keys-in all the data into a "Point-Of-Sales" machine. That data is transaction data and the related system is a OLTP system.
On the other hand, the manager of the store might want to view a report on out-of-stock materials, so that he can place purchase order for them. Such report will come out from OLAP system
What is data mart?
Data marts are generally designed for a single subject area. An organization may have data pertaining to different departments like Finance, HR, Marketting etc. stored in data warehouse and each department may have separate data marts. These data marts can be built on top of the data warehouse.
What is ER model?
ER model is entity-relationship model which is designed with a goal of normalizing the data.
What is Dimensional Modeling?
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Sample Questions from next page ...
1. What is dimensional modeling?
2. What is dimension?
3. What is fact?
4. What are additive, semi-additive and non-additive measures?
5. What is Star-schema?
6. What is snow-flake schema?
7. What are the different types of dimension?
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