(Continued from previous part...)

General Datawarehousing Interview Questions and Answers (3)

What does level of Granularity of a fact table signify?

Granularity
The first step in designing a fact table is to determine the granularity of the fact table. By granularity, we mean the lowest level of information that will be stored in the fact table. This constitutes two steps:

Determine which dimensions will be included.
Determine where along the hierarchy of each dimension the information will be kept.
The determining factors usually goes back to the requirements

What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP?

Main Differences between OLTP and OLAP are:-

1. User and System Orientation

OLTP: customer-oriented, used for data analysis and querying by clerks, clients and IT professionals.

OLAP: market-oriented, used for data analysis by knowledge workers( managers, executives, analysis).

2. Data Contents

OLTP: manages current data, very detail-oriented.

OLAP: manages large amounts of historical data, provides facilities for summarization and aggregation, stores information at different levels of granularity to support decision making process.

3. Database Design

OLTP: adopts an entity relationship(ER) model and an application-oriented database design.

OLAP: adopts star, snowflake or fact constellation model and a subject-oriented database design.

4. View

OLTP: focuses on the current data within an enterprise or department.

OLAP: spans multiple versions of a database schema due to the evolutionary process of an organization; integrates information from many organizational locations and data stores

What is SCD1 , SCD2 , SCD3?

SCD Stands for Slowly changing dimensions.

SCD1: only maintained updated values.

Ex: a customer address modified we update existing record with new address.

SCD2: maintaining historical information and current information by using

A) Effective Date
B) Versions
C) Flags

or combination of these

SCD3: by adding new columns to target table we maintain historical information and current information.

Why are OLTP database designs not generally a good idea for a Data Warehouse?

Since in OLTP,tables are normalised and hence query response will be slow for end user and OLTP doesnot contain years of data and hence cannot be analysed.

What is BUS Schema?

BUS Schema is composed of a master suite of confirmed dimension and standardized definition if facts.

(Continued on next part...)