Business intelligence Interview Questions & Answers

Question 1. What Is Business Intelligence?

Answer :

Business Intelligence is a technology used for preparing the reports for multidimensional analyses.

Question 2. What Is Supervisor?

Answer :

Supervisor is the product is used to set up and maintain a secure environment for Business Objects products.

Question 3. What Are The Various Business Objects Products?

Answer :

• User Module
• Designer
• Supervisor
• Auditor
• Set Analyzer
• Info View (Web Intelligence)
• Business Objects Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Broadcast Agent etc.

Question 4. What Are The Different Multidimensional Analysis Methods Available In Business Objects?

Answer :

There are 2 Multidimensional analysis methods available in BO, they are:

1. Slice and Dice.
2. Drill Down.

Question 5. What Is Slice And Dice?

Answer :

Slice and dice mode enables you to switch the position of data in a report (for example, move data from columns to rows).

Question 6. What Are The Advantages Of Business Objects Over Other Dss?

Answer :

• User Friendly
• Familiar Business Terms
• Graphical Interface
• Drag and Drop
• Powerful reports in less time
• Enterprise wide Deployment of documents using WebI
• Customized dashboards using Application foundation and Business Objects SDK

Question 7. What Are The Different Schemas Supported By Bo Designer?

Answer :

• Star Schema
• Snowflake Schema
• Multistar Schema
• Normalized production Schema
• Data warehouse with aggregates

Question 8. What Are All The Data Providers Supported By Bo?

Answer :

• Queries on Universe
• Stored procedure
• Free hand SQL
• Text files or Spread sheets
• VBA Procedures
• OLAP servers
• SAP

Question 9. What Is A Hierarchy?

Answer :

• A hierarchy is an ordered series of related dimensions grouped together to perform multidimensional hierarchy.
• The relationship between object in the hierarchy is one – to – many.

Question 10. What Are The Types Of Hierarchy?

Answer :

There are two types of hierarchies:

1. Default hierarchy: It contains the dimension objects in the order in which they are presented in the class.
2. Custom hierarchy: A custom hierarchy is created from default hierarchy.

Question 11. How Do You Create A Universe, Step-by-step Approach?

Answer :

Designing, Creating and maintaining a universe The phased in this include:

• Planning: Break down the information system into functional areas.
• Analysis: Analyze the information needs of users
• Design: Design a conceptual schema
• Design: The specification of a universe
• Implementation: Create a universe with DESIGNER
• Test the universe with BUSINESSOBJECTS/WEBINTELLIGENCE
• Distribute the universe
• Repeat the above steps for other universes
• Maintenance: Update and maintain the universe
• Notify end users of changes.

Question 12. What Is Scope Of Analysis?

Answer :

• "Scope of analysis" means a subset of data, returned by a query that you will use for analysis in your report.
• The data for your scope of analysis does not appear in the report until you decide that you want to use it in analysis.

Question 13. What Is Join?different Types Of Joins?

Answer :

• Join is the relation that occurs between the two tables that helps to combine into one table.
• The purpose of join is that to restrict the Cartesian product.
• The join is specified in the Where clause of the sql statement.

The different types of joins are:

• Equi join - is based on the equality between the values in the column. Because the same column is present in both tables, the join synchronizes the two tables.
• Outer join - An outer join links two tables, one of which has rows that do not match those in the common column of the other table.
• Theta join - A theta join links tables based on a relationship other than equality between two columns.
• Shortcut join - Shortcut joins can be used in schemas containing redundant join paths leading to the same result, regardless of direction.

Question 14. What Is A Data Provider?

Answer :

The data source (Query) is called as the data provider.

Question 15. Did You Do Metadata Reporting In Bo?

Answer :

Metadata reporting of BO is possible. BO provides a separate universe which actually contains repository tables, objects etc.Using this Universe one can do metadata reporting in BO.

Question 16. What Are The Ways By Which U Can Distribute The Universe?

Answer :

There are two ways to distribute a universe:

1. through the repository 
2. through the file system.

Question 17. What Are The Main Components Of The Designer Interface?

Answer :

The main components that interact in the designing of universe are :

• Table browser - The table browser is used to choose the tables and columns.
• The Structure pane - The Structure pane refers the database structure of the universe.
• The Universe pane - The Universe pane refers the components in which it is going to use in BO or WEBI documents.

Question 18. What Are New In Bo 5.1?

Answer :

• Save business objects documents in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
• Add hyperlinks to reports such as mail addresses and web site addresses.
• These hyperlinks are maintained when you save the report in HTML or PDF.
• Zero Administration – Only the business objects client software installed on the windows pc; all middleware is stored and administered on the web intelligence web server and the server side processing is handled by the web intelligence system.

Question 19. What Is The Repository?

Answer :

The repository is the database in which the information about the users and data is present. It is created and maintained by the general supervisor. It is used to share resources of business objects.
It comprises of three domains:

• Universe domain – It holds all the exported universes and there may be more than one universe domain in the repository.
• Document domain – It holds all exported documents, templates, scripts, and lists of values.
• Security domain - secured connections are stored in this.

Question 20. What Are The Tasks Of The Universe Designer?

Answer :

The responsibilities that universe designer has: 

• Designing, Creating and maintaining the Universe. 
• Distributing the Created Universes.

Question 21. What Is The Difference Between Built-in-strategies And External Strategies?

Answer :

Built-In-Strategies:

• Extracting the joins with tables
• Detect cardinalities in joins
• Create default classes and objects from the tables
• Objects - In this we can set how the objects to be displayed in the universe pane
• Joins - In this we can set how the joins between the tables has to be retrieved like matching column names or matching names etc.
• Tables - In this it will reads the table structure from the database.

The other strategies:

• Setting the number of rows to be retrieved - default 100
• The number of row retrieved from database
• The execution time of the query based on the number of minutes specified.
• The maximum size of the long text objects.

External Strategies: External strategies are declared in STG section of .PRM file. We can create the external strategy using either sql or flat file.

Question 22. What Is Strategy?

Answer :

The strategy is the script that automatically extracts the structural information from the database or flat file.

• Built-in-strategies
• External strategies

Question 23. Where Will You Find The Address Of Repository In Bo?

Answer :

BO Main.key, File that contains the address of the repository's security domain.

Question 24. What Is The Channel?

Answer :

A channel is a Web site that uses "push" technology, also known as Webcasting, to keep subscribers abreast of up-to-date information.

Each BUSINESSOBJECTS channel is associated with a BROADCAST AGENT, itself associated with a user group in the Business Objects repository. One BROADCAST AGENT can have several channels.

Question 25. How Do You Define Universe Parameters?

Answer :

The first step in creating a universe is to specify its parameters.

These parameters include the definition of a universe, which is comprised of the universe name, a description of the universe, a connection to an RDBMS. You enter universe parameters from the Universe Parameters dialog box.

This dialog box also lets you set up database options, external strategies, graphic options, and print settings.

Question 26. What Do You Mean By Object Qualification?

Answer :

• The qualification of an object reveals how it can be used in multidimensional analysis.
• An object can be qualified as a dimension, a detail, or a measure.
• In the Universe pane, the symbol beside each object indicates its qualification.

Question 27. What Is Alert Message?

Answer :

An alert is a message which is displayed before viewing the data records.

Question 28. What Is Drill Up/down/by/through?

Answer :

• Drill mode allows you to analyze data from different angles and on different levels of detail.
• Drill down displays next level of detail in hierarchy.
• Drill up goes back up through the hierarchy to display data on less detailed levels.
• By using Drill by option you can move to another hierarchy to analyze other data that belongs to a different hierarchy.
• Drill Through if the lowest level of detail you need is not currently available in the report, you can drill through to the database directly from drill mode and get the data you need. You do not have to edit the query in the Query Panel.

Question 29. What Are The Formats Supported For Business Objects Documents?

Answer :

You can view Business Objects documents in the following formats:

• HTML
• PDF
• Enhanced Document Format
• Business Objects Format

Question 30. What Is Join?

Answer :

A Join is a relationship that explains how the data in one table relates to data in another table.

Question 31. What Are Linked Universes?

Answer :

If the data provided is from two different data providers then we can link those two universes, such type of universe is called Linked Universe.

Question 32. What Is Business Intelligence 80 / 20 Concept?

Answer :

In a business Intelligence environment 80% of development time is allocated to OLAP interface designing, 20% of time allocated to Report development.

Question 33. How Can You Check The Universe?

Answer :

Using check Integrity, u can check the universe.

Go to Designer, Tools -> check Integrity

Question 34. Can We Have A Report With Multiple Data Sources?

Answer :

Yes.

Question 35. How Do You Design A Universe?

Answer :

The design method consists of two major phases:

• During the first phase, you create the underlying database structure of your universe. This structure includes the tables and columns of a database and the joins by which they are linked. You may need to resolve loops which occur in the joins using aliases or contexts. You can conclude this phase by testing the integrity of the overall structure.
• During the second phase, you can proceed to enhance the components of your universe. You can also prepare certain objects for multidimensional analysis. As with the first phase, you should test the integrity of your universe structure. Finally, you can distribute your universes to users by exporting them to the repository or via your file system.

Question 36. What Are Different Types Of Parsing?

Answer :

There are two types of parsing:

1. Quick parsing
2. Through parsingents

Question 37. What Is A Prompt?

Answer :

A Prompt is an end users object, which allows the users to enter the value or select the values to restrict the data in the report.

Question 38. What Are The Features In Bca?

Answer :

• Automated document scheduling and publishing.
• On the server side, CORBA-enabled features such as load balancing and server optimization using caches.
• Tracing BROADCAST AGENT activity

Question 39. What Are The Roles Of Bo Administrator?

Answer :

The following are the responsibility assigned to administrator:

• Installations and configurations in a distributed environment .
• Creating the BO Enterprise Repository.
• Performing back up and recovery of Metadata.
• Tuning the servers.
• Deployment of reports.

Question 40. What Are The Resources That Are Managed By Supervisor?

Answer :

• Business objects products
• Universes
• Documents
• Repository domains
• Stored Procedure

Question 41. What Is A Report Bursting?

Answer :

Report bursting allows you to maintain the version documents based on the user profiles.

Question 42. What Is The Technique Used In The Bca?

Answer :

1. BROADCAST AGENT is a collection of server components that can be deployed over a distributed CORBA network.
2. The distributed architecture enables scalability, load balancing and failover.

Question 43. What Is Olap Interface?

Answer :

• A good OLAP interface writes an efficient SQL and reads an aqua rate data from database.
• To design the interface and architect having good knowledge on database under standing the report requirements.

Question 44. What Is An Application Developer Or Report Developer?

Answer :

Design the Reports according to the report requirement templates.
Testing the each report with following types of tests:

1. Unit Testing
2. System Testing
3. Performance Testing
4. User Acceptance Test (UAT)

Question 45. What Are The Types Of Filters Which Affects The Report?

Answer :

There are two types of filter:

• A global filter affects the whole report.
• A blockspecific filter only filters data for the specified chart, table or crosstab.

Question 46. What Are Cardinalities?

Answer :

Cardinality expresses the minimum and maximum number of instances of an entity B that can be associated with an instance of an entity A. The minimum and the maximum number of instances can be equal to 0, 1, or N.

Because a join represents a bi-directional relationship, it must always have two cardinalities.

There are two main methods for detecting or editing cardinalities:

• The Detect Cardinalities command
• The Edit Join dialog box

Question 47. What Is Bca?

Answer :

BCA is a software product for the users of WEBI and BO to process and distribute documents automatically at the scheduled dates and time.

Question 48. What Are The Types Of Objects?

Answer :

The following types of objects can be created in the universe:

• Dimension
• Measure
• Detail

Question 49. What Is Designer?

Answer :

• Designer is a Business Objects IS module used by universe designers to create and maintain universes.
• Universes are the semantic layer that isolates end users from the technical issues of the database structure.
• Universe designers can distribute universes to end-users by moving them as files through the file system, or by exporting them to the repository.

Question 50. What Is Business Objects?

Answer :

• Business Objects is a Dynamic Business intelligence reporting solution from Business Objects.
• BUSINESS OBJECTS is an integrated query, reporting and analysis solution for business professionals that allow them to access the data in their corporate databases directly from their desktop and present and analyze this information in a BUSINESS OBJECTS document.
• It is an OLAP tool that high-level management can use as a part of a Decision Support Systems (DSS).
• BUSINESS OBJECTS makes it easy to access the data, because you work with it in business terms that are familiar to you, not technical database terms like SQL.

Question 51. What Are The Types Of Query Filter That You Use In Web Intelligence?

Answer :

There are four types of Query Filter you use in Web intelligence:

1. Predefined Filters
2. Single and Multi – value Filters
3. Prompted Filters
4. Complex Filters

Question 52. What Functions Are Supported?

Answer :

Designer provides four types of functions:

1. Number
2. Character
3. Date and
4. @Functions.

Functions beginning with the @ character are BusinessObject functions that render the definition of objects dynamic and database–independent.

Question 53. What Is Data Mining?

Answer :

Data Mining is the analysis of data and use of software techniques for extracting hidden, comprehensible, and useful information from databases.

Question 54. What Are The Data Mining Technologies?

Answer :

• Statistics
• Cluster Analysis
• Neural Network
• Data visualization
• Decision Trees

Question 55. What Are The Activities In Data Mining?

Answer :

Modeling the relationships among objects in the data mining to explore and use those relationships.