What is OLAP? OLAP is abbreviation of Online Analytical Processing.

This system is an applicat ion that collects, manages, processes and presents multidimensional data for ana lysis and management purposes.

What is the difference between OLTP and OLAP? 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, ex ecutives, analysis).

Data Source OLTP: Operational data is from original data source of the data OLAP: Consolidation data is from various source. Process Goal OLTP: Snapshot of business processes which does fundamental business tasks OLAP: Multi-dimensional views of business activities of planning and decision ma king Queries and Process Scripts OLTP: Simple quick running queries ran by users. OLAP: Complex long running queries by system to update the aggregated data. Database Design OLTP: Normalized small database. Speed will be not an issue due to smaller datab ase and normalization will not degrade performance. This adopts entity relations hip(ER) model and an application-oriented database design. OLAP: De-normalized large database. Speed is issue due to larger database and de -normalizing will improve performance as there will be lesser tables to scan whi le performing tasks. This adopts star, snowflake or fact constellation mode of s ubject-oriented database design.

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

OLAP: spans multiple versions of a database schema due to the evolutionary proce ss of an organization; integrates information from many organizational locations and data stores Data Contents OLTP: manages current data, very detail-oriented. OLAP: manages large amounts of historical data, provides facilities for summariz ation and aggregation, stores information at different levels of granularity to support decision making process.

Example Comparsion: In a departmental shop, when we pay the prices at the check-out counter, the sal es person at the counter keys-in all the data into a "Point-Of-Sales" machine. T hat data is transaction data and the related system is a OLTP system. On the other hand, the manager of the store might want to view a report on out-o f-stock materials, so that he can place purchase order for them. Such report wil l come out from OLAP system

What is data mart? Data marts are generally designed for a single subject area. An organization may have data pertaining to different departments like Finance, HR, Marketting etc. stored in data warehouse and each department may have separate data marts. Thes e data marts can be built on top of the data warehouse.

What is ER Diagram? The Entity-Relationship (ER) model was originally proposed by Peter in 1976 [Che n76] as a way to unify the network and relational database views. Simply stated the ER model is a conceptual data model that views the real world as entities an d relationships. A basic component of the model is the Entity-Relationship diagr am, which is used to visually represent data objects. Since Chen wrote his paper the model has been extended and today it is commonly used for database design f or the database designer, the utility of the ER model is: it maps well to the re lational model. The constructs used in the ER model can easily be transformed in to relational tables. It is simple and easy to understand with a minimum of trai ning. Therefore, the database designer to communicate the design to the end user can use the model. In addition, the model can be used as a design plan by the d atabase developer to implement a data model in specific database management soft ware.

What is dimensional modeling? Dimensional model consists of dimension and fact tables. Fact tables store diffe rent transactional measurements and the foreign keys from dimension tables that qualifies the data. The goal of Dimensional model is not to achive high degree o f normalization but to facilitate easy and faster data retrieval.

Ralph Kimball is one of the strongest proponents of this very popular data model ing technique which is often used in many enterprise level data warehouses. If you want to read a quick and simple guide on dimensional modeling, please che ck our Guide to dimensional modeling. ..........................................

What is Dimensional Modeling? Dimensional Modeling is a design concept used by many data warehouse designers t o build their data warehouse. In this design model all the data is stored in two types of tables - Facts table and Dimension table. Fact table contains the fact s/measurements of the business and the dimension table contains the context of m easurements i.e., the dimensions on which the facts are calculated. Dimension mo deling is a method for designing data warehouse. Three types of modeling are the re 1. Conceptual modeling 2. Logical modeling 3. Physical modeling ......................................... What is dimension? A dimension is something that qualifies a quantity (measure). For an example, consider this: If I just say 20kg , it does not mean anything. But i f I say, "20kg of Rice (Product) is sold to Ramesh (customer) on 5th April (date )", then that gives a meaningful sense. These product, customer and dates are so me dimension that qualified the measure - 20kg. Dimensions are mutually independent. Technically speaking, a dimension is a data element that categorizes each item in a data set into non-overlapping regions. .......................................... What is Fact? A fact is something that is quantifiable (Or measurable). Facts are typically (b ut not always) numerical values that can be aggregated. What is Meta data? Metadata is data about data. E.g. if in data mart we are receiving any file. The n metadata will contain information like how many columns, file is fix width/lim ited, ordering of fields, data types of field etc. Briefly state different between data ware house & data mart? Data warehouse is made up of many datamarts. DWH contain many subject areas. How ever, data mart focuses on one subject area generally. E.g. If there will be DHW of bank then there can be one data mart for accounts, one for Loans etc. This i s high-level definitions. ............................................ What is Difference between E-R Modeling and Dimensional Modeling? Basic difference is E-R modeling will have logical and physical model. Dimension al model will have only physical model. E-R modeling is used for normalizing the OLTP database design.Dimensional modeling is used for de-normalizing the ROLAP/ MOLAP design. ............................................

What is the difference between view and materialized view? View - store the SQL statement in the database and let you use it as a table. Ev ery time you access the view, the SQL statement executes. Materialized view - st ores the results of the SQL in table form in the database. SQL statement only ex ecutes once and after that every time you run the query, the stored result set i s used. Pros include quick query results. ............................................. Explain What are snapshots? What are materialized views & where do we use them? What is a materialized view log? Snapshots are read-only copies of a master table located on a remote node which is periodically refreshed to reflect changes made to the master table. Snapshots are mirror or replicas of tables. Views are built using the columns from one or more tables. The Single Table View can be updated but the view with multi table cannot be updated. A View can be updated/deleted/inserted if it has only one base table if the view is based on columns from one or more tables then insert, update and delete is n ot possible. Materialized view A pre-computed table comprising aggregated or joined data from fact and possibly dimension tables. Also known as a summary or aggregate table. .............................................. Explain What are the Different methods of loading Dimension tables? Conventional Load: Before loading the data, all the Table constraints will be checked against the d ata. Direct load:(Faster Loading) All the Constraints will be disabled. Data will be loaded directly.Later the dat a will be checked against the table constraints and the bad data won't be indexe d. ................................................ What is a level of Granularity of a fact table? Level of granularity means level of detail that you put into the fact table in a data warehouse. For example: Based on design you can decide to put the sales da ta in each transaction. Now, level of granularity would mean what detail are you willing to put for each transactional fact. Product sales with respect to each minute or you want to aggregate it upto minute and put that data. ................................................