SAS DI Interview Questions & Answers

Question 1. What Is Data Integration?

Answer :

• The process of combining data from different resources.
• The combined data is provided to the users with unified view.
• Information from different enterprise domains are integrated – known as Enterprise Information Integration.
• Useful for merging information from different technologies among enterprises.

Question 2. What Is Transformation In Sas Data Integration?

Answer :

It is a metadata object which determines how to extract data, transform data and load data into data stores.

Question 3. What Is Change Analysis In Sas Di?

Answer :

Change analysis is the process of comparing one set of metadata to another set of metadata and identifying the differences between the two sets of metadata.

Question 4. What Is The Difference Between Unique Key And Primary Key?

Answer :

Unique key is one or more columns that can be used to uniquely identify a row in a table. A table can have one or more unique keys. Unique keys can contain null values. While on the other hand table can have only one primary key. One or more columns in a primary key cannot contain null values.

Question 5. Explain About Pivot – Columns To Rows?

Answer :

• Data Integrator produces a row in the output data set for every value in the designated pivot column.
• More than one pivot column can be set as per the need of application’s data integration.

Pivot Sequence Column – Data Integrator increments a sequence number for every row created from a pivot column.

Non-Pivot column – The columns that need to appear in the target.

Pivot Set – A group of pivot columns, unique data field and header column.

Data Field Column – It contains the pivot data along with pivot columns values.

Header Column – Lists the name of the columns.

Question 6. What Are The Benefits Of Data Integration?

Answer :

Following are the benefits of data integration:

• Makes reporting, monitoring, placing customer information across the enterprise flexible and convenient.
• Data usage is efficient.
• Cost Effective.
• Risk adjusted profitability management as it allows accurate data extraction.
• Allows timely and reliable reporting, as data quality is the prime technology for business challenges.

Question 7. Describe How To Adjust The Performance Of Data Integrator?

Answer :

Following are the ways to perform this:

• Using array fetch size.
• Ordering the joins.
• Extracted data minimizing.
• Locale conversion minimization.
• Setting target-based options to optimize the performance.
• Improving throughput.
• Data type conversion minimization.

Question 8. What Do You Mean By Data Staging Area?

Answer :

Staging area of the data warehouse is both the storage area and set of process commonly referred as extract transformation load. The data staging area is everything between the operational source systems and the data presentation area.

Question 9. What Is Data Governance?

Answer :

It is the robust, reliable, repeatable and controlled process both at point of input and through subsequent downstream control checks. This process exists to manage updates of business rules to maintain a level of consistency.

Question 10. What Is Data Access?

Answer :

It is the access by selected business users to raw (untransformed) data loads.

Question 11. What Is Slowly Changing Dimension?

Answer :

This is the technique for tracking changes to dimensional table values in order to analyze trends. For example, a dimension table named customers might have columns for customer id, home address and income. Each time the address or income changes for a customer, a new row could be created for that customer in the dimensional table and old row could be retained.

Question 12. What Is Snowflake Schema?

Answer :

Snowflake schema is defined in which a single fact table is connected to multiple dimension tables. The dimension are structured to minimize update anomalies and to address single themes.

Question 13. What Is Star Schema?

Answer :

Star schema is defined as database in which single fact table is connected to multiple dimension tables. This is represented in a star schema.

Question 14. What Is Sas Application Server, Database Server, Sas Olap Server And Sas Metadata Server?

Answer :

SAS application server provides SAS services to a client. On the other hand database server provides relational database service to a client. Oracle, DB2, and Teradata are examples of relational databases.  SAS OLAP server provides access to multidimensional data. SAS metadata server provides metadata management services to one or more client application.

Question 15. What Is Operational Data And Operational System?

Answer :

Operational data is used as source data for a data warehouse. While operational system is one or more programs that provide source data for a data warehouse.

Question 16. What Is The Use Of Sas Management Console?

Answer :

SAS management console application provides a single user interface for performing SAS administrative tasks.

Question 17. Name Some Data Transformation Used In Sas Di?

Answer :

Types of the data transformation are append, apply lookup standardization, create match code transformation, data transfer, data validation, extract, fact table lookup, key effective data transformation, lookup, SAS rank, SAS sort, SAS splitter, SCD type 2 loader, SQL join, standardize transformation, Surrogate key generator , Transpose transformation, User written code transformation.

Question 18. Describe About Metadata Object?

Answer :

It is a set of attributes that describe a table, a server, a user and another resource on a network.

Question 19. Name The Scheduler For Scheduling Job And Explain The Scheduler?

Answer :

The scheduler used for scheduling job is control m while CONTROL-m also user to view process flow and dependencies so that they can optimize business processes easily and efficiently, even in a data center that includes multiple platform types (for example, Unix, Microsoft Windows, and MVS)

Question 20. What Is Change Analysis In Sas Di ?

Answer :

Change analysis is the process of comparing one set of metadata to another set of metadata and identifying the differences between the two sets of metadata.

Question 21. Describe The Interaction Table In Sas Di?

Answer :

Table that describes the relationships between two or more tables. For example, an intersection table could describe the many-to-many relationships between a table of users and a table of groups.

Question 22. What Are The Prime Responsibilities Of Data Integration Administrator?

Answer :

• Scheduling and executing the batch jobs.
• Configuring, starting and stopping the real-time services
• Adapters configuration and managing them.
• Repository usage, Job Server configuration.
• Access Server configuration.
• Batch job publishing.
• Real-time services publishing through web services.

Question 23. Explain The Difference Between Alternate Key, Business Key, Foreign Key , Generated Key , Primary Key, Retained Key And Surrogate Key ?

Answer :

• Alternate key is term also known as unique key.
• Business key is one or more columns in a dimension table that comprise the primary key in a source table in an operational system.
• Foreign key is one or more columns that are associated with a primary key or unique key in another table. A table can have one or more foreign keys. A foreign key is dependent upon its associated primary or unique key. In other words, a foreign key cannot exist without that primary or unique key.
• Generated keys is used to implement surrogate keys and retained keys, one or more columns that are used to uniquely identify a row in a table. A table can have only one primary key. One or more columns in a primary key cannot contain null values. Retained key is a numeric column in a dimension table that is the primary key of that table.
• Surrogate key is a column which contains unique integer values that are generated sequentially when rows are added and updated. In the associated fact table, the surrogate key is included as a foreign key in order to connect to specific dimensions.

Question 24. Explain About Data Integrator Metadata Reports?

Answer :

Browser-based analysis and reporting capabilities are provided by Metadata reports.

The DI Metadata Reports are generated on metadata that associates with Data Integration jobs.

Other BO applications those are associated with Data Integration.

Three modules are provided by Metadata Reports. They are:

• Operational Dashboards.
• Auto Documentation.
• Impact and Lineage analysis.

Question 25. Explain About Various Caches Available In Data Integrator?

Answer :

NO_CACHE – It is used for not caching values.

PRE_LOAD_CACHE – Result column preloads and compares the column into the memory, prior to executing the lookup.

PRE_LOAD_CACHE is used when the table can exactly fit in the memory space.

DEMAND_LOAD_CACHE – Result column loads and compares the column into the memory when a function performs the execution.

DEMAND_LOAD_CACHE is suitable while looking up the highly repetitive values with small subset of data.

Question 26. What Is Hierarchy Flattening?

Answer :

• Construction of parent/child relationships hierarchy is known as Hierarchy Flattening.
• A description of hierarchy in the vertical or horizontal format is produced.
• The hierarchy pattern includes Parent column, Child Column, Parent Attributes and Child Attributes.
• Hierarchy Flattening allows to understand the basic hierarchy of BI in a lucid manner.
• As the flattening is done in horizontal or vertical format, the sub elements are easily identified.

Question 27. Is Data Integration And Etl Programming Is Same?

Answer :

• No, Data Integration and ETL programming are different.
• Passing of data to different systems from other systems is known as data integration.
• It may integrate data within the same application.
• ETL, on the other hand, is to extract the data from different sources.
• The primary ETL tool job is to transform the data and loads into other objects or tables.

Question 28. Describe About Physical Data Integration?

Answer :

Physical Data Integration is all about creating new system that replicates data from the source systems. This process is done to manage the data independent of the original system. Data Warehouse is the example of Physical Data Integration. The benefits of PDI include data version management, combination of data from various sources, like mainframes, flat files, databases.

Question 29. Why Is Sas Data Integration Studio Important?

Answer :

Companies are realizing that in order to succeed they need an integrated view of their data and SAS Data Integration Studio is the single tool that provides the flexibility, reliability and agility needed to respond to new data integration challenges. Regardless of the project, SAS Data Integration Studio users can respond with speed and efficiency, reducing the overall cost of data integration.

Question 30. For Whom Is Sas Data Integration Studio Designed?

Answer :

SAS Data Integration Studio empowers data integration managers and designers to work more efficiently, manage change effectively and deliver high-quality results faster.

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