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General Datawarehousing Interview Questions and Answers (4)

What are the various Reporting tools in the Market?

1. MS-Excel
2. Business Objects (Crystal Reports)
3. Cognos (Impromptu, Power Play)
4. Microstrategy
5. MS reporting services
6. Informatica Power Analyzer
7. Actuate
8. Hyperion (BRIO)
9. Oracle Express OLAP
10. Proclarity

What is Normalization, First Normal Form, Second Normal Form , Third Normal Form?

1.Normalization is process for assigning attributes to entities–Reducesdata redundancies–Helps eliminate data anomalies–Produces controlledredundancies to link tables

2.Normalization is the analysis offunctional dependency between attributes / data items of userviews?It reduces a complex user view to a set of small andstable subgroups of fields / relations

1NF:Repeating groups must beeliminated, Dependencies can be identified, All key attributesdefined,No repeating groups in table

2NF: The Table is already in1NF,Includes no partial dependencies–No attribute dependent on a portionof primary key, Still possible to exhibit transitivedependency,Attributes may be functionally dependent on non-keyattributes

3NF: The Table is already in 2NF, Contains no transitivedependencies

What is Fact table?

Fact Table contains the measurements or metrics or facts of business process. If your business process is "Sales" , then a measurement of this business process such as "monthly sales number" is captured in the Fact table. Fact table also contains the foriegn keys for the dimension tables.

What are conformed dimensions?

Answer1:
Conformed dimensions mean the exact same thing with every possible fact table to which they are joined Ex:Date Dimensions is connected all facts like Sales facts,Inventory facts..etc

Answer2:
Conformed dimentions are dimensions which are common to the cubes.(cubes are the schemas contains facts and dimension tables)
Consider Cube-1 contains F1,D1,D2,D3 and Cube-2 contains F2,D1,D2,D4 are the Facts and Dimensions here D1,D2 are the Conformed Dimensions

What are the Different methods of loading Dimension tables?

Conventional Load:
Before loading the data, all the Table constraints will be checked against the data.

Direct load:(Faster Loading)
All the Constraints will be disabled. Data will be loaded directly.Later the data will be checked against the table constraints and the bad data won't be indexed.

What is conformed fact?

Conformed dimensions are the dimensions which can be used across multiple Data Marts in combination with multiple facts tables accordingly

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