Business Intelligence & Big Data

Question 1

What is Business Intelligence

Answer 1

Includes a wide range of applications, practices and technologies for the extraction, transformation, integration, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data to support improved decision making

Question 2

What is a Data Warehouse?

Answer 2

A database that stores large amounts of historical data in a form that readily supports analysis and management decision making

Question 3

What is ETL?

Answer 3

A process used to pull data from different data sources to populate and maintain the data warehouse

Question 4

Explain the Extract step

Answer 4

Designed to access the various data sources and pull from each source the data desired to update the data warehouse

Question 5

Explain the transform step

Answer 5

The data that will be used to update the data warehouse is edited and, if necessary, converted to a different format

Question 6

Explain the load step

Answer 6

Updates the existing data warehouse with the data that have passed through the extract and transform steps. This creates a new, updated version of the data warehouse.

Question 7

What is a Data Mart

Answer 7

A smaller version of a data warehouse-scaled down to meet the specific needs of a specific business unit.

Question 8

What is Big Data?

Answer 8

Data collections that are enormous and complex that traditional relational management software, hardware and analysis processes are incapable of dealing with them

Question 9

ACID

Answer 9

Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability
- properties that guarantee database transactions are processed reliably and ensure the integrity of data in the database.

Question 10

What is In-Memory Database?

Answer 10

A database management system that stores an entire database in random access memory (RAM)

Question 11

Business Intelligence Tools

Answer 11

Spreadsheets
Dashboards
OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)
Drill-Down Analysis
Data Mining
Reporting and Quering Tools

Question 12

What is OLAP?

Answer 12

A method used to analyze multidimensional data from many different perspectives
- Dimensions: Time, metric, location

Question 13

What is Drill-Down Analysis?

Answer 13

Involves the interactive examination of high-level summary data in increasing detail to gain insight into certain elements

Question 14

Explain Data Mining

Answer 14

A BI tool used to explore large amounts of data for hidden patterns to predict future trends and behaviors for use in decision making

Question 15

Process of Data Mining

Answer 15

1. Selection of the data to be used
2. Preprocessing of the data to remove erroneous, incomplete or inconsistent data
3. Transformation of the data to create an appropriate set of data to support the data mining technique to be used
4. The actual data mining process
5. Evaluation of the results

Question 16

Name the Data Mining Techniques

Answer 16

1. Neural Computing
2. Case-based reasoning
3. Association analysis

Question 17

Explain Case-Based Reasoning

Answer 17

Historical if-then-else cases are used to recognize patterns

Question 18

Explain Association Analysis

Answer 18

A specialized set of algorithms sorts through data and forms statistical rules about relationships among items

Question 19

Explain Neural Computing

Answer 19

Historical data is examined for patterns that are then used to make predictions

Question 20

What are Dashboards?

Answer 20

Dashboards present a set of key performance indicators about the the state of a process at a specific point in time