Review

The following questions are designed to reinforce key information presented in the chapter. If you are unable to answer a question, review the appropriate lesson and then try the question again. Answers to the questions can be found in Appendix A: Questions and Answers.

1. You are designing a data warehousing system for a retail grocery chain. The company wants to be able to track changes to products over time. For example, the company would like to answer questions such as, "What was the impact on sales of changing six-pack cola can size from 12 ounces to 11.5 ounces?" How should you design dimension records, and why?
2. What type of solution for slowly changing dimensions is most commonly found in data warehouse implementations?
3. You manage a data warehouse and large OLAP cubes for a manufacturing company. Two groups of users use the system and query different parts of the system in different ways. The manufacturing operations group performs detailed analysis on work-in-process inventory on a daily basis to optimize manufacturing efficiency. The sales group is concerned only with summary information, such as how many units of a particular product sold in a given week. Would it be effective to use partitions in the design of your cube?
4. You have a cube that contains information that is used by all users in your company as well as sensitive information that must be available to a small number of users. How should you implement security to control access to the sensitive information?
5. When you designed a cube for your data warehousing system, you selected a high level of optimization (50 percent). This resulted in a large cube, and processing is now taking longer than your processing window. What should you do to identify and correct the problem?

Answers