Business Intelligence

Question 1

What is OLAP?

Answer 1

Online Analytical Processing Server; a component that sits between a client and the DBMS, designed to analyse the data.

Question 2

What are the two types of OLAP servers?

Answer 2

ROLAP:
Relational OLAP - maps operations on multidimensional data to standard relational operators

MOLAP:
Multidimensional OLAP - directly implements multidimensional data operations

Question 3

What is a Star Schema?

Answer 3

Consists of one or more fact tables (typically large) that contain primary information of interest and one or more dimension tables (related to the fact tables through foreign keys) each of which contains information about the entries in the fact table. Fact tables typically contain measures (numerical values of elements that are measurable).

Question 4

Name and describe four types of Business Intelligence.

Answer 4

Reports:
Formatted printouts (or screen displays) of the contents of one or more tables in a database

Dashboards:
User Interface that, resembling an automobile’s
dashboard, organizes and presents information on a single computer screen.

Scorecards:
A report card of how a person, business unit or entity
in general, performed with respect to certain goals over a given time period.

Data Mining:
The process of discovering meaningful correlations, patterns and trends in data (relatively large amounts) stored in repositories.