Databases and Information Management Part 2

52) Which of the following is not one of the techniques used in Web mining? A) content mining B) structure mining C) usage mining D) user mining Answer: D 53) You work for a retail clothing chain whose primary outlets are in shopping malls and are conducting an analysis of your customers and their preferences. You wish to find out if there are any particular activities that your customers engage in, or the types of purchases made in the month before or after purchasing select items from your store. To do this, you will want to use data mining software that is capable of A) identifying associations. B) identifying clusters. C) identifying sequences. D) classification. Answer: C 54) You work for an national car rental agency and want to determine what characteristics are shared among your most loyal customers. To do this, you will want to use data mining software that is capable of A) identifying associations. B) identifying clusters. C) identifying sequences. D) classification. Answer: D 55) A data warehouse is composed of A) historical data from legacy systems. B) current data. C) internal and external data sources. D) historic and current internal data. Answer: D 56) A data mart usually can be constructed more rapidly and at lower cost than a data warehouse because A) a data mart typically focuses on a single subject area or line of business. B) all the information is historical. C) a data mart uses a Web interface. D) all of the information belongs to a single company. Answer: A 57) Tools for analyzing data to help users find patterns, relationships, and insights and make better business decisions are known as A) DSS. B) business intelligence. C) OLAP. D) data mining. Answer: B 58) The tool that enables users to view the same data in different ways using multiple dimensions is A) predictive analysis. B) SQL. C) OLAP. D) data mining. Answer: C 59) OLAP is a tool for enabling A) users to obtain online answers to ad-hoc questions in a rapid amount of time. B) users to view both logical and physical views of data. C) programmers to quickly diagram data relationships. D) programmers to normalize data. Answer: A 60) Data mining is a tool for allowing users to A) quickly compare transaction data gathered over many years. B) find hidden relationships in data. C) obtain online answers to ad hoc questions in a rapid amount of time. D) summarize massive amounts of data into much smaller, traditional reports. Answer: B 61) In terms of data relationships, associations refers to A) events linked over time. B) patterns that describe a group to which an item belongs. C) occurrences linked to a single event. D) undiscovered groupings. Answer: C 62) ________ tools are used to analyze large unstructured data sets, such as e-mail, memos, survey responses, etc., to discover patterns and relationships. A) OLAP B) Text mining C) Web mining D) Web content mining Answer: B 63) An alternative to using application server software for interfacing between a Web server and back-end databases is A) CGI. B) HTML. C) Java. D) SQL. Answer: A 64) The 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. Answer: A 65) The special organizational function whose responsibilities include the technical and operational aspects of managing data, including physical database design and maintenance, is called A) data administration. B) database administration. C) information policy administration. D) data auditing. Answer: B 66) 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 Answer: D 67) 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. Answer: C 68) You are creating a database to store temperature and wind data from national airport locations. Which of the following fields is the most likely candidate to use as the basis for a primary key in the Airport table? A) address B) city C) airport code D) state Answer: C 69) Data cleansing not only corrects errors but also A) establishes logical relationships between data. B) structures data. C) normalizes data. D) enforces consistency among different sets of data. Answer: D 70) 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 Answer: C 71) Databases record information about general categories of information referred to as ________. Answer: entities 72) Data ________ describes a situation in which the same attribute of a data entity may have different values. Answer: inconsistency 73) A(n) ________ view shows data as it is actually organized and structured on the data storage media. Answer: physical 74) DBMS have a(n) ________ capability to specify the structure of the content of the database. Answer: data definition 75) Relational DBMSs use ________ rules to ensure that relationships between coupled tables remain consistent. Answer: referential integrity 76) In a client/server environment, a DBMS is located on a dedicated computer called a(n) ________. Answer: database server 77) In ________, a data mining tool discovers different groupings within data, such as finding affinity groups for bank cards. Answer: clustering 78) The technique of using data mining, historical data, and assumptions about future conditions is called ________. Answer: predictive analytics 79) A(n) ________ is software that handles all application operations between browser-based computers and a company's back-end business applications or databases. Answer: application server 80) In data mining, the technique of ________ uses a series of existing values to predict what other values will be. Answer: forecasting 81) The small publishing company you work for wants to create a new database for storing information about all of their author contracts. What factors will influence how you design the database? Answer: Student answers will vary, but should include some assessment of data quality; business processes and user needs; and relationship to existing IT systems. Key points to include are: Data accuracy when the new data is input, establishing a good data model, determining which data is important and anticipating what the possible uses for the data will be, beyond looking up contract information, technical difficulties linking this system to existing systems, new business processes for data input and handling, and contracts management, determining how end users will use the data, making data definitions consistent with other databases, what methods to use to cleanse the data. 82) When you design the new contracts database for the publishing house mentioned above, what fields do you anticipate needing? Which of these fields might be in use in other databases used by the company? Answer: Author first name, author last name, author address, agent name and address, title of book, book ISBN, date of contract, amount of money, payment schedule, date contract ends. Other databases might be an author database (author names, address, and agent details), a book title database (title and ISBN of book), and financial database (payments made). 83) List at least three conditions that contribute to data redundancy and inconsistency. Answer: Data redundancy occurs when different divisions, functional areas, and groups in an organization independently collect the same piece of information. Because it is collected and maintained in so many different places, the same data item may have: (1) different meanings in different parts of the organization, (2) different names may be used for the same item, and (3) different descriptions for the same condition. In addition, the fields into which the data is gathered may have different field names, different attributes, or different constraints. 84) List and describe three main capabilities or tools of a DBMS. Answer: A data definition capability to specify the structure of the content of the database. This capability would be used to create database tables and to define the characteristics of the fields in each table. A data dictionary to store definitions of data elements in the database and their characteristics. In large corporate databases, the data dictionary may capture additional information, such as usage; ownership; authorization; security; and the individuals, business functions, programs, and reports that use each data element. A data manipulation language, such as SQL, that is used to add, change, delete, and retrieve the data in the database. This language contains commands that permit end users and programming specialists to extract data from the database to satisfy information requests and develop applications. 85) What types of relationships are possible in a relational database? Describe and give an example of each. Answer: A one-to-one relationship occurs when each record in one table has only one related record in a second table. An example might be a table of salespeople and a separate table of company cars. Each salesperson can only have one car, or be related to the one car in the database. A one-to-many relationship occurs when a record in one table has many related records in a second table. An example might be a table of salespeople and clients. Each salesperson may have several clients. A many-to-many relationship occurs when records in one table have many related records in a second table, and the records in the second table have many related records in the first table. An example might be a clients table and a products table. Clients may buy more than one product, and products are sold to more than one client. 86) Identify and describe three basic operations used to extract useful sets of data from a relational database. Answer: The select operation creates a subset consisting of all records (rows) in the table that meets stated criteria. The join operation combines relational tables to provide the user with more information than is available in individual tables. The project operation creates a subset consisting of columns in a table, permitting the user to create new tables that contain only the information required. 87) 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 to determine what supplies are in demand by which customers, and whether needs are different in different geographical areas. DSS databases using business intelligence 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. 88) Describe the ways in which database technologies could be used by an office stationery supply company to achieve product differentiation. Answer: Product databases could be made available to customers for greater convenience when ordering online. Databases could be used to track customer preferences and to help anticipate customer desires. Sales databases could also help a client anticipate when they would need to resupply, providing an additional service. Data mining could help anticipate trends in sales or other factors to help determine new services and products to sell to the clients. 89) 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. 90) 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?