1.

What is a Fact? The word fact can refer to verified information about past or present circumstances or events which are presented as objective reality. In science, it means a provable concept.

2. What is a Dimension? In a data warehouse, a dimension is a data element that categorizes each item in a data set into non-overlapping regions.For example, "Customer", "Date", and "Product" are all dimensions that could be applied meaningfully to a sales receipt 3. What is andata Attribute? A data attribute is an instance or occurrence of any attribute type. A data attribute value is a characteristic of or any fact describing the occurrence of an entity. For instance, an entity's color maybe "red" or "blue" and other color that correctly describes the entity. 4. In data warehousing, a fact table consists of the measurements, metrics or facts of a business process. Basically fact tables consist of quantitative data.

5. data validation is the process of ensuring that a program operates on clean, correct and useful data.

6. Normalization splits up data to avoid redundancy (duplication) by moving commonly repeating groups of data into new tables. Normalization therefore tends to increase the number of tables that need to be joined in order to perform a given query, but reduces the space required to hold the data and the number of places where it needs to be updated if the data changes. 7. thestar schema (also called star-join schema, data cube, or multi-dimensional schema) is the simplest style of data warehouseschema. The star schema consists of one or more fact tables referencing any number of dimension tables. The star schema is an important special case of the snowflake schema, and is more effective for handling simpler queries. 8. The snowflake schema is similar to the star schema. However, in the snowflake schema, dimensions are normalized into multiple related tables, whereas the star schema's dimensions are normalized with each dimension represented by a single table. 9. Parameters are placeholders that require a value to determine what data to report on, and prompts ask the user to provide a value or values for the corresponding parameter. Prompts can also be used to control report displays or to sort data.

10. inner join An inner join using either of the equivalent queries gives the intersection of the two tables, i.e. the two rows they have in common.

11. Componenets of Report Studio: 1. Insertable Objects pane. 2. Properties pane. 3. Explorer bar - Conditional Explorer, Query Explorer, Page Explorer. 4. Report Viewer - Workarea, Report Layout Objects.

12. What is a measure: Any quantitative value,) In a data warehouse, a measure is a property on which calculations (e.g., sum, count, average, minimum, maximum) can be made

Star schema vs Snowflake Schema

What is star schema?Star schema is data warehousing data model which resembles to star. There are one or more fact table connected with multiple dimensional tables. Center of the star consist of one or more fact table and fact is pointing to different dimension tables. Dimension tables have a simple primary key, while fact tables have a composit primary key consisting of the aggregate of relevant dimension keys. Fact table consists of Measurements or facts of business process. It is centeralized table in star schema, called FACT. A fact table typically has two types of columns: those that contain facts and those that are foreign keys to dimension tables. The primary key of a fact table is usually a composite key that is made up of all of its foreign keys. Fact table contains the content of the Datawarehouse. A fact table might contain either detail level facts or facts that have been aggregated (fact tables that contain aggregated facts are often instead called summary tables). In

the real world, it is possible to have a fact table that contains no measures or facts. These tables are called as Factless Fact tables. Factless Fact means only the key available in the Fact and there are no measures available. Factless fact can have only keys or keys with count of occurrences/ events (For instance, no of accident in a month, no of policies has been closed in a month). It is used to support negative analysis report. For example a Store that did not sell a product for a given period. It is used to join the dimension tables. Dimension table is a parent table which is connected with Fact table. Dimension has attributes which are normally descriptive and textual values. For instance, SALES table is fact table and possible dimension tables are TIME, PRODUCT, REGION, SALESPERSON, etc. Dimension never have foreign key in star schema data model. Slowly changing dimension(SCD) applies to cases where the attribute for a record varies over time. We have three type of SCD, Type1, Type2 and Type3. Type1: The new record replaces the original record. No trace of the old record exists Type2: A new record is added into the customer dimension table. Therefore, the customer is treated essentially as two people. Type3: The original record is modified to reflect the change To learn more about SCD, please clickSCD Here is sample data model for star schema. In the below data model, the dimensions are products, customers, time and locations. The fact table is sales and it is connected with all dimension. Now we can see the fact data with different dimensions. The fact table Foreign key will be connected with primary key of dimension table. We never connect the one dimension table to another dimension table. Oracle optimizer understand the star query and generate the different execution plan to improve the performance.

What is snowflake schema? The snowflake schema is an extension of the star schema, where each point of the star explodes into more points. In a star schema, each dimension is represented by a single dimensional table, whereas in a snowflake schema, that dimensional table is normalized into multiple lookup tables, each representing a level in the dimensional hierarchy. Here is sample data model for snowflake schema.. Here customer dimension is normalized into another lookup table customertype. The same way, we can also normalize the customer dimension into another lookup table as country. Location dimension is normalized into territory. Product dimension can also be normalized into another lookup table as supplier...

Advantages of Snowflake... 1. No redundancy and hence more easy to maintain and change. 2. When we normalize the dimension, the dimension will not be sparsed. 3. It reduce the disk space since there is no redundancy. But in real world scenario, dimension is small table and disk space is not a major issue.

Disadvantages of Snowflake... 1. You need to join more tables when we write the query. It is less easy to understand. 2. In snowflake model, query process time will increase, since we are joining multiple tables. When should we go for snowflake schema? Dimension has many columns, and the data are very sparse, most of the fields has no data, also disk space is a concern, then we can think of snowflake. Since dimension tables hold less space, snow flake schema approach may be avoided in some organization. We can go for snowflake model when we have small data mart or datawarehouse. Star schema model is good for bigger data mart/warehouse. To learn more about snowflake schema, please click.

13. Running count concept: Thanks for the reply. the rank data item that i created contains an increment value(1,2,3,145,145,146,...178) instead of (1,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1). I know in SQL you can do this by row number() and i can filter for rank=1. Is there a way to do this in report studio data item and set the filter=1? If you do the running count function the first time it sees 145 it will be 1. The second time will be 2. Then when you set filter to = 1 the 2nd will disappear like magic. :) example
running-count (rank([IDkey],[Amountkey],[Textkey],[Date]))

14. "Auto Group & Summarize" = Yes, eliminates duplicate rows

15. Difference Between Style variable & Render Variable

Render Variable: - Specify a variable based on which object can be conditionally rendered.

Style Variable: - Specify a variable based on which object can be conditionally styled. Style variable is used to show or represent different report objects in different styles that are present in report. Example for Style Variable In a report in a list if u want to display every alternate row with particular color in this case, go to query explorer.... 1) create a data item with name running-count with function "running-count" on particular unique column 2) now create one more data item as mod with functon "mod" on that running-count data item. Select List and in properties pane..select 'Properties' and select 'running-count' and 'mod' data items. 3)create a booleanvaribale with expression mod=1 4)go to the page select List column Body style 5)In properties pane select Style Variable as boolean variable 6)click on YES variable and set its Foreground color as RED 7)click on No variable and set its Foreground color as Yellow now run the report

Example for Render Variable if the case is like you want to see the particular page in HTML or PDF or CSV format then 1)Create 3 pages in your report 2)every page conatins some specific data 3)name these pages as HTML,PDF,CSV 4)create a String vaiable with 3 values as HTML ,PDF and CSV 5)now in string variable put expression as ..... case when ReportOutput()='HTML' then 'HTML' when ReportOutput()='PDF' then 'PDF' when ReportOutput()='CSV' then 'CSV' end 6)now go the page named HTML and select page object 7)in properties pane click on Render Variable ,select that string variable 8)check only HTML check box value for HTML page 9)repeat step No. 6 to step No.8 for remaining 2 pages.