Databases and Information Management Part 3

65) In data mining, which of the following involves recognizing patterns that describe the group to which an item belongs by examining existing items and inferring a set of rules? A) Associations B) Sequences C) Classifications D) Clustering E) Forecasting Answer: C Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 66) In data mining, which of the following involves events linked over time? A) Associations B) Sequences C) Classifications D) Clustering E) Forecasting Answer: B Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 67) MongoDB and SimpleDB are both examples of: A) open source databases. B) SQL databases. C) NoSQL databases. D) cloud databases. E) big data databases. Answer: C Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 20 68) Which of the following would you use to find patterns in user interaction data recorded by a web server? A) Web usage mining B) Web server mining C) Web structure mining D) Web content mining E) Web protocol mining Answer: A Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 69) HTML has become the preferred method of communicating with back-end databases because it is a cross-platform language. Answer: FALSE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 70) Legacy systems are used to populate and update data warehouses. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 71) Multiple data marts are combined and streamlined to create a data warehouse. Answer: FALSE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 72) You can use OLAP to perform multidimensional data analysis. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 21 73) OLAP is unable to manage and handle queries with very large sets of data. Answer: FALSE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 74) In-memory computing relies primarily on a computer (RAM) for data storage. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 75) Middleware is an application that transfers information from an organization's internal database to a web server for delivery to a user as part of a web page. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 76) Implementing a web interface for an organization's internal database usually requires substantial changes to be made to the database. Answer: FALSE Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 77) You can manipulate data on a web server by using a CGI script. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 78) You can use text mining tools to analyze unstructured data, such as memos and legal cases. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 22 79) In a client/server environment, a DBMS is located on a dedicated computer called a web server. Answer: FALSE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 80) Associations are occurrences linked to multiple events. Answer: FALSE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 81) High-speed analytic platforms use both relational and non-relational tools to analyze large datasets. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Reflective thinking LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 82) You have been hired by a furniture leasing company to implement its first business intelligence systems and infrastructure. To prepare for your initial report, describe the types of data the firm can use to support business intelligence and the systems that you will implement to support both power users and casual users, and explain how these systems or tools work together. Answer: All types of data can be used for their business intelligence systems, including operational, historical, machine-generated, Web/social data, audio and video data, and external data. The large datasets can be collected in a Hadoop cluster and used by an analytic platform to support power user queries, data mining, OLAP, etc. A data warehouse can be used to house all data, including smaller data sets and operational data, and be used to support casual use, for queries, reports, and digital dashboards, as well as support the analytic platforms. Smaller data marts can be created from the data warehouse to enable faster querying and typical queries from casual users. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 23 83) Describe the ways in which database technologies could be used by an office stationery supply company to achieve low-cost leadership. Answer: Sales databases could be used to make the supply chain more efficient and minimize warehousing and transportation costs. You can also use sales databases, as well as text mining and sentiment analysis, to determine what supplies are in demand by which customers and whether needs are different in different geographical areas. Business intelligence databases could be used to predict future trends in office supply needs, to help anticipate demand, and to determine the most efficient methods of transportation and delivery. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 84) Describe the ways in which database technologies could be used by a toy manufacturer to achieve product differentiation. Answer: Product databases could be made available to customers for greater convenience and ordering online. Databases could be used to track customer preferences and to help anticipate customer desires. Sales databases could also help clients such as toy stores anticipate when they would need to re-supply, providing an additional service. Data mining, Web mining, and sentiment analysis of big data could help anticipate trends in sales or other factors to help determine new services and products to sell to clients. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 24 85) What makes data mining an important business tool? What types of information does data mining produce? In what type of circumstance would you advise a company to use data mining? Answer: Data mining is one of the data analysis tools that helps users make better business decisions and is one of the key tools of business intelligence. Data mining allows users to analyze large amounts of data and find hidden relationships between data that otherwise would not be discovered. For example, data mining might find that a customer that buys product X is ten times more likely to buy product Y than other customers. Data mining finds information such as: • Associations or occurrences that are linked to a single event. • Sequences, events that are linked over time. • Classification, patterns that describe the group to which an item belongs, found by examining existing items that have been classified and by inferring a set of rules. • Clusters, unclassified but related groups. I would advise a company to use data mining when they are looking for new products and services, or when they are looking for new marketing techniques or new markets. Data mining might also be helpful when trying to analyze unanticipated problems with sales whose causes are difficult to identify. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 86) What are the differences between data mining and OLAP? When would you advise a company to use OLAP? Answer: Data mining uncovers hidden relationships and is used when you are trying to discover data and new relationships. It is used to answer questions such as: Are there any product sales that are related in time to other product sales? In contrast, OLAP is used to analyze multiple dimensions of data and is used to find answers to complex, but known, questions, such as: What were sales of a product—broken down by month and geographical region, and how did those sales compare to sales forecasts? Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 87) What are the similarities and differences between a data warehouse and a data mart? Answer: A data warehouse stores current and historical data of potential interest throughout a company. Data warehouses gather data from multiple operational systems inside the organization. Data warehouses make data available, but do not allow that information to be altered. Data marts are subsets of data warehouses, in which a highly focused portion of an organization's data is placed in a separate database for specific users. Data marts are decentralized, whereas data warehouses are enterprise-wide, central locations for data. Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Application of knowledge; Written and oral communication LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 25 88) Explain what the term big data refers to. What benefits does it have, and what challenges does it pose? Answer: The term big data is used to describe datasets with volumes so huge that they are beyond the ability of typical DBMS to capture, store, and analyze. Big data is created by the explosion of data coming from the Web, such as Web traffic, e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as information from other electronic and networked devices such as sensors and meters. Businesses are interested in big data because it contains more patterns and interesting anomalies than smaller data sets, with the potential to provide new insights into customer behavior, weather patterns, financial market activity, or other phenomena. However, to derive business value from big data, organizations need new technologies and tools capable of managing and analyzing non-traditional data along with their traditional enterprise data. They also need to know what questions to ask of the data and the limitations of big data. Capturing, storing, and analyzing big data can be expensive, and information from big data may not necessarily help decision-makers. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Application of knowledge; Written and oral communication LO: 6-3: What are the principal tools and technologies for accessing information from databases to improve business performance and decision making? 89) An organization's rules for sharing, disseminating, acquiring, standardizing, classifying, and inventorying information is called a(n): A) information policy. B) data definition file. C) data quality audit. D) data governance policy. E) data policy. Answer: A Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 90) In a large organization, which of the following functions would be responsible for physical database design and maintenance? A) Data administration B) Database administration C) Information policy administration D) Data auditing E) Database management Answer: B Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 26 91) Which common database challenge is illustrated by a person receiving multiple copies of an L.L. Bean catalog, each addressed to a slightly different variation of his or her full name? A) Data normalization B) Data accuracy C) Data redundancy D) Data inconsistency E) Data duplication Answer: D Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 92) Detecting and correcting data in a database or file that are incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted, or redundant is called: A) data auditing. B) defragmentation. C) data scrubbing. D) data optimization. E) data normalization. Answer: C Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 93) Data cleansing not only corrects errors but also: A) establishes logical relationships between data. B) structures data. C) normalizes data. D) removes duplicate data. E) enforces consistency among different sets of data. Answer: E Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 27 94) Which of the following is not a method for performing a data quality audit? A) Surveying entire data files B) Surveying samples from data files C) Surveying data definition and query files D) Surveying end users about their perceptions of data quality E) Surveying managers about their perceptions of data quality Answer: C Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 95) In a large organization, which of the following functions would be responsible for policies and procedures for managing internal data resources? A) Data administration B) Database administration C) Information policy administration D) Data auditing E) Database management Answer: A Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 96) The term data governance refers to the policies and processes for managing the integrity and security of data in a firm. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 97) Data scrubbing is a more intensive corrective process than data cleansing. Answer: FALSE Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Information technology LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 28 98) List three ways that a business's data can become redundant or inconsistent. Answer: Data redundancy and inconsistency can occur because of (1) employing different names and descriptions for the same entities or attributes; (2) multiple systems feeding a data warehouse; (3) incorrect data entry. Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Application of knowledge; Written and oral communication LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 99) Distributors for a furniture manufacturer are complaining that the billing for goods they order is frequently not correct, and sometimes are sent to the wrong e-mail and postal addresses. What steps would you take to improve the quality of data in the manufacturer's databases? Answer: The first step is to perform a data quality audit, a survey of the accuracy and level of completeness in all the firm's major databases. Once issues are identified, initiate a program for data cleansing to correct data that is incomplete, improperly formatted, redundant, or just plain wrong. Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Application of knowledge; Written and oral communication LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 100) What is an information policy and why is it needed in a firm? Answer: An information policy specifies the organization's rules for sharing, disseminating, acquiring, standardizing, classifying, and inventorying information. Information policy lays out specific procedures and accountabilities, identifying which users and organizational units can share information, where information can be distributed, and who is responsible for updating and maintaining the information. An information policy is needed in firms because data are an important resource, and you don't want people doing whatever they want with them. You need to have rules on how the data are to be organized and maintained and who is allowed to view the data or change them. Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Application of knowledge; Written and oral communication LO: 6-4: Why are information policy, data administration, and data quality assurance essential for managing a firm's data resources? 29