Chapter 6

Question 0

What are Informational Formats?

Answer 0

Document, Presentation, Spreadsheet, Database

Question 1

What are informational levels?

Answer 1

Individual, Department, Enterprise

Question 2

What are Information Granularities?

Answer 2

Detail (Fine), Summary, Aggregate (Coarse)

Question 3

What is transactional information?

Answer 3

Encompasses all of the information contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of daily operational tasks. (i.e. airline ticket, sales receipt, packing slip)

Question 4

What is analytical information?

Answer 4

Encompasses all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of managerial analysis tasks. (i.e. product statistics, sales projections, future growth, trends)

Question 5

What are the characteristics of high-quality information?

Answer 5

1. Accurate
2. Complete
3. Consistent
4. Unique
5. Timely

Question 6

What are the four primary sources of low quality information?

Answer 6

1. Customers intentionally enter inaccurate information to protect their privacy
2. Different entry standards and formats
3. Operators enter abbreviated or erroneous information by accident or to save time
4. Third party and external information contains inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and errors.

Question 7

What are the potential business effects resulting from low quality information?

Answer 7

1. Inability to accurately track customers
2. Difficulty identifying valuable customers
3. Inability to identify selling opportunities
4. Marketing to nonexistent customers
5. Difficulty tracking revenue
6. Inability to build strong customer relationships

Question 8

What are the benefits of good information?

Answer 8

1. High quality information can significantly improve the chances of making a good decision.
2. Good decisions can directly impact an organization’s bottom line.

Question 9

What is an entity?

Answer 9

A person, place, thing, transaction, or event about which information is stored. (i.e. The rows in a table contain entities)

Question 10

What is an attribute (field, column)?

Answer 10

The data elements associated with an entity. (i.e. the columns in each table contain the attributes)

Question 11

What is a record?

Answer 11

A collection of related data elements.

Question 12

What is a primary key?

Answer 12

A field (or group of fields) that uniquely identifies a given entity in a table.

Question 13

What is a foreign key?

Answer 13

A primary key of one table that appears as an attribute in another table and acts to provide a logical relationship among the two tables.

Question 14

What are the primary goals of a database?

Answer 14

1. Increased Flexibility
2. Increased Scalability and Performance
3. Reduced Information Redundancy
4. Increased Information Integrity
5. Increased Information Security

Question 15

What does the elimination of data redundancy do for a database?

Answer 15

It reduces inconsistency, which is one of the primary problems with redundant information.

Question 16

What is information redundancy?

Answer 16

The duplication of data or storing the same information in multiple places.

Question 17

A well designed database should:

Answer 17

1. Handle changes quickly and easily
2. Provides users with different views
3. Have one physical view (physical storage of info. on a storage device)
4. Have multiple logical views (how users logically access info. to meet own business needs)

Question 18

What is information integrity?

Answer 18

Measures the quality of information.

Question 19

What is an integrity constraint?

Answer 19

rules that ensure the quality of information (i.e. relational integrity constraint & business-critical integrity restraint)

Question 20

What are some of the security features databases offer?

Answer 20

1. Password - provides authentication of the user
2. Access level - determines who has access to the different types of information
3. Access control - determines types of user access, such as read-only access

Question 21

What is a data warehouse?

Answer 21

A logical collection of information - gathered from many different operational databases - that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks.

Question 22

What is the primary purpose of a data warehouse?

Answer 22

To aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes.

Question 23

What is an ETL?

Answer 23

(Extraction, transformation, and loading) A process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse.

Question 24

What is a data mart?

Answer 24

Contains a subset of data warehouse information.

Question 25

Can you define two relational integrity constraints for an ordering system?

Answer 25

1. Users cannot create an order for a nonexistent customer

2. An order cannot be shipped without an address

Question 26

Can you define two business-critical integrity constraints for an ordering system?

Answer 26

1. Product returns are not accepted for fresh product 15 days after purchase.
2. A discount maximum of 20 percent.