Business intelligence Interview Preparation Guide

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That is more self-explanatory than previous questions. Ability to view or create report by users is the short answer but usually reporting tools like SSRS are much more powerful and they allow to set up subscriptions, provider reports in different usable for users format, secure reports and so on.

ETL (Extract Transform Load) is used to extract data from various sources. Transform the data which means applying business rules and performing data cleaning (the latter being often overlooked that causes issues) and Load the clean data into data warehouse. Sometimes in ETL there is also master data management element so it can extract data, perform transformation and it may use proper tools to perform data cleansing and check business rules. In recent versions of SQL Server (including 2012) we can have Master Data Services (MDS) and Data Qaulity Services (DQS).

Cubes allow to store larges amounts (usually track history) of data and get very good performance. Security is very detailed and it can be applied on "member level" which is an individual value in a column. Cubes usually track history so user get access to "point in time" data and accurate data. My favorite example is top 1 customer that moves its location from London to Bristol with cubes (or more data warehouses) historic data will not move to Bristol and it will remain in London which is very often not the case in providing reporting information from operational systems.

This is open question and answers will vary but the candidate might say ETL (SSIS), Data Warehouse and Cubes (SSAS) and Reporting (SSRS). This list can be longer and can include data mining, master data management, data profiling, data cleansing, analysis and data gathering also can be added here.

A BOMain.key file contains all relevant information about the repository. It contains the address of the repository security domain.

Object qualification is an attribute of an object that helps to determine how it can be used in multidimensional analysis.

Slicing and dicing of business objects is used for a detailed analysis of the data. It allows changing the position of data by interchanging rows and columns.

SAS BI provides the information about an enterprise when needed. It provides this information in customized format. SAS BI integrates data across the enterprise and delivers the self-service reporting and analysis. This consumes less time for responding requests and for business uses to view the information. An integrated, flexible and robust presentation layer for SAS Analytics with full breadth is also offered by SAS BI. All these are integrated within the context of business for better and faster decision making.

Dashboard in business intelligence is used for rapid prototyping, cloning and deployment for all databases, operational applications or spread sheets through an organization.
A dashboard in BI allows an enterprise's status/position, heading to, by using graphs, maps and chars. The drill-down and roll-over capabilities allows organizing things without revealing important information. It is fully customizable, including free-form design options. Dashboard consolidates vital statistics of business into an easy-to-read page.

Batch processing can be used to schedule reports. Objects can be also be used for batch processing. Batch processing can be used to also select the objects to be processed.

Security domain in business objects is a domain containing all security information like log-in credentials etc. It checks for users and their privileges.

A universe connects the client to the data warehouse. It is a file defining relationships amongst the tables in the warehouse, classes and objects, database connection details.

A broadcast agent allows automation of emails to be distributed. It allows reports to be sent to different business objects. It also users to choose the report format and send via SMS, fax, pagers etc. broadcast agents allows the flexibility to the users to receive reports periodically or not. They help to manage and schedule the documents.

☛ SQL Server Integration Services:- Used for data transformation and creation. Used in data acquisition form a source system.
☛ SQL Server Analysis Services: Allows data discovery using data mining. Using business logic it supports data enhancement.
☛ SQL Server Reporting Services:- Used for Data presentation and distribution access.

SAS business intelligence has analytical capabilities like statistics, reporting, data mining, predictions, forecasting and optimization. They help in getting data in the format desired. It helps in improving quality of data.

A dashboard in business intelligence allows huge data and reports to be read in a single graphical interface. They help in making faster decisions by replying on measurable data seen at a glance. They can also be used to get into details of this data to analyze the root cause of any business performance. It represents the business data and business state at a high level. Dashboards can also be used for cost control. Example of need of a dashboard: Banks run thousands of ATM's. They need to know how much cash is deposited, how much is left etc.

The following are the standard Business Intelligence tools in the market:
☛ Business object crystal reports
☛ Micro strategy
☛ MS-Olap services
☛ Cognos report net

Business intelligence tools are to report, analyze and present data. Few of the tools available in the market are:
☛ Eclipse BIRT Project:- Based on eclipse. Mainly used for web applications and it is open source.
☛ JasperSoft:- BI tool used for reporting, ETL etc.
☛ Pentaho:- Has data mining, dashboard and workflow capabilities.
☛ Openl:- A web application used for OLAP reporting.

Business Intelligence helps to manage data by applying different skills, technologies, security and quality risks. This also helps in achieving a better understanding of data. Business intelligence can be considered as the collective information. It helps in making predictions of business operations using gathered data in a warehouse. Business intelligence application helps to tackle sales, financial, production etc business data. It helps in a better decision making and can be also considered as a decision support system.

Supervisor:
Supervisor is the control center for the administration and security of your entire BusinessObjects deployment.

Designer:
Designer is the tool used to create, manage and distribute universe for BusinessObjects and WebIntelligence Users. A universe is a file that containe connection parameters for one or more database middleware and SQL structure called objects that map to actual SQL structure in the database as columns,tables and database.

BusinessObjects Full client Reporting tool:
Helps to create businessobjects reports based on the universe and also from the other data sources.

BusinessObjects Thin client Reporting tool:
Helps to querry and analysis on the universe and also share the report among other users. It doesnt require any software, just need a webbrowser and the system connected to the businessobjetcs server.

Auditor:
Tool is used for monitor and analysis user and system activity.

Application Foundation:
This module covers a set of products which is used for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). The tools are

► Dashboard manager
► Scorecard
► Performance Management Applications

Some of the standard Business Intelligence tools in the market According to there performance

1)MICROSTRATEGY
2)BUSINESS OBJECTS,CRYSTAL REPORTS
3)COGNOS REPORT NET
4)MS-OLAP SERVICES

We can connect Ab Initio GDE with Co>operating system using Run->Settings.In there u can specify the host IP address and the connection type .Refer Ab Initio help for further details.

1:M

► Operational Data Store has very low data latency. Data moved to ODS mostly on event based rather than time based ETL to Data Warehouse/Data Mart.

► ODS is more closer to OLTP system. We don't normally prefer to store aggregated data in OLTP. So it is with ODS.

► Unlike data warehouse where data is HISTORICAL, ODS is near real time(NRT). So data aggregation is less important is ODS as data keeps changing.

We can tune the report by using index awareness in universe