Data Modeler Test Questions

1. What is Data Model?

Data Model is the graphical representation of the Logical Data Model
Business Requirements and the Database objects Physical Data Model. It
shows how the entities in the database are stored and associated with each
other.
2. What are the different types of data models?
Conceptual data model, logical data model, and physical data model are the
three types of Data Models.
3. What is the difference between logical and physical modeling?
Logical Data model contain the entities, attributes, primary key, foreign key,
relationships which represent the data that exist in the database.
Physical Data Models have entities, attributes, primary key, foreign key,
relationships, datatypes, column name, table name, it represents how the
data is implemented in the database.
4. What is Forward Engineering?
Forward engineering is the process of building high level data models we
build logical data model and move to build physical data model to implement
in the database.
5. What are different types of relationships?
Identifying relationships exist when the primary key of the parent entity is
included in the primary key of the child entity. On the other hand, a nonidentifying relationship exists when the primary key of the parent entity is
included in the child entity but not as part of the child entity's primary key
6. What is 3rd Normal form?
When a table has atomic values, the non key columns depend on primary key
and there is no transitive dependency between the columns of the table.
7. What is Primary Key?
Primary Key is a constraint applied on the table to avoid null and duplicate
values.
8. What is dimensional modeling?
Dimensional modeling is technique where the data is described as facts and
dimensions. Fact is the aggregated value and the dimensions are the entities
used for filtering the facts.
9. What is the difference between star and snow flake schema?
this schema is called the star schema: it looks like a star, with the dimension
tables surrounding the central fact table.
The fact table has the same dimensions as it does in the star schema
example. The most important difference is that the dimension tables in the

snowflake schema are normalized. Interestingly, the process of normalizing

dimension tables is called snowflaking.
10.What is factless fact table?
A factless fact table is a fact table that does not have any measures. It is
essentially an intersection of dimensions.
11.What is Type 2 dimension?
In Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimension, a new record is added to the table to
represent the new information. Therefore, both the original and the new
record will be present. The new record gets its own primary key.
12.What is Type 3 dimension?
In Type 3 Slowly Changing Dimension, there will be two columns to indicate
the particular attribute of interest, one indicating the original value, and one
indicating the current value. There will also be a column that indicates when
the current value becomes active.
13.What is Conformed dimension?
A conformed dimension is a dimension that has exactly the same meaning
and content when being referred from different fact tables.
14.What is Surrogate Key?
A table that includes information on employees may use Social Security
Number as the primary key. This type of key is called a natural key. The
second is to use a new field with artificially-generated values whose sole
purpose is to be used as a primary key. This is called a surrogate key.
A surrogate key has the following characteristics:
1) It is typically an integer.
2) It has no meaning. You will not be able to know the meaning of that row of
data based on the surrogate key value.
3) It is not visible to end users. End users should not see a surrogate key in a
report.
15.What is Meta Data?
Metadata is simply defined as data about data. The data that is used to
represent other data is known as metadata. For example, the index of a book
serves as a metadata for the contents in the book. In other words, we can say
that metadata is the summarized data that leads us to detailed data.
16.Difference between OLTP and OLAP system?
OLTP Online Transactional Processcing. The approach from which data
models are designed from transactions is called OLTP; Eg bank tranx

OLAP is an acronym for Online Analytical Processing. OLAP performs

multidimensional analysis of business data and provides the capability for
complex calculations, trend analysis, and sophisticated data modeling.
17.What is the difference between data mart and database?
A Subselection of a Data Warehouse built to serve a SPECIFIC purpose, such
as reporting on Sales of SalesReps compared to Salary.... The datamart is
normally a subselection in terms of physical tables in order to boost end user
preformance, aggregate (summary) tables may also be delivered at this
point.
The name of a type of application that stores the information for either Data
Warehouse, Data Mart or other records in an easily accessible format, a
Database Server Application is something that serves user requests for
information to store data or retrieve data from the database. Database Server
Applications are for example Oracle, MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server.
18.What are indexes?
An index allows a query to efficiently retrieve data from a database. Indexes
are related to specific tables and consist of one or more keys. A table can
have more than one index built from it.
19.What is Compare and Merge Utility?
The Compare and Merge utility allows you to reconcile differences between
models in the same file or between a model and a database. For example,
you have designed and created a model and then created a database based
on that data model. A data modeler alters the model and adds a column
Gender to the Employee table and simultaneously a DBA alters the
Department table in the database and adds a column Name to the table. The
model and the database are no longer in synch. The Compare and Merge
utility compares a source and a target model.
20. Normalize the following table.