MIS chapter 6

OLAP is a tool for enabling

users to obtain online answers to ad-hoc questions in a rapid amount of time.

A database server is software that handles all application operations between browser-based computers and a company's back-end business applications or databases.

FALSE

The tool that enables users to view the same data in different ways using multiple dimensions is

OLAP

Every record in a file should contain at least one key field.

True

In terms of data relationships, associations refers to

occurrences linked to a single event

In a table for customers, the information about a single customer would reside in a single

row

In a relational database, the three basic operations used to develop useful sets of data are

select, project, and join.

Which of the following is not one of the techniques used in Web mining?

server mining

What are the differences between data mining and OLAP? When would you advise a company to use OLAP?

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?

Implementing a Web interface for an organization's internal database usually requires substantial changes to be made to the database.

FALSE

In a client/server environment, a DBMS is located on a dedicated computer called a Web server.

FALSE

The organization's rules for sharing, disseminating, acquiring, standardizing, classifying, and inventorying information is called a(n)

INFORMATION POLICY

The most prominent data manipulation language today is

SQL

An application that transfers information from an organization's internal database to a Web server for delivery as part of a Web page to the user is called middleware.

TRUE

The coupling of data with the software programs that manipulate the data, such that changes in programs requires changes to the data, is called program-data dependence.

True

A(n) ________ is a characteristic or quality that describes a database entity.

attribute

You work for a 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

classification.

All of the following are technologies used to analyze and manage big data except

cloud computing

A schematic of the entire database that describes the relationships in a database is called a(n)

entity-relationship diagram.

In associations, a data mining tool discovers different groupings within data, such as finding affinity groups for bank cards.

FALSE

A one-to-many relationship between two entities is symbolized in a diagram by a line that ends with

a crow's foot topped by a short mark.

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?

airport code

A household appliances manufacturer has hired you to help analyze their social media datasets to determine which of their refrigerators are seen as the most reliable. Which of the following tools would you use to analyze this data?

sentiment analysis software

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?

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).

________ creates confusion that hampers the creation of information systems that integrate data from different sources.

Data redundancy

The process of streamlining data to minimize redundancy and awkward many-to-many relationships is called

Normalization

High-speed analytic platforms use both relational and non-relational tools to analyze large datasets.

TRUE

Legacy systems are used to populate and update data warehouses.

TRUE

Data mining is a tool for allowing users to

find hidden relationships in data.

A(n) ________ is an example of non-digital data storage that is comparable to a database.

library card catalog

A DBMS makes the

physical database available for different logical views.

The logical view of a database

presents data as they would be perceived by end users.

A field identified in a table as holding the unique identifier of the table's records is called the

primary key

Data ________ occurs when the same data is duplicated in multiple files of a database.

redundancy

A(n) ________ organizes data in two-dimensional tables.

relational DBMS

The relationship between entities and attributes is best illustrated by

the entity CUSTOMER with the attribute PURCHASE.

Big data does not refer to

datasets with fewer than a billion records

You have been hired by a national furniture leasing company to implement its first business intelligence systems and infrastructure. To prepare for your initial report, describe the types of data in their firm they can use to support business intelligence and the systems that you will implement to support both their power users and casual users, and explain how these systems or tools work together.

All types of data can be used for their business intelligence systems, including operational, historical, machine-generated, Web/social data, audio and video data, and external data. The large datasets can be collected in a Hadoop cluster and used by an analytic platform to support power user queries, data mining, OLAP, etc. A data warehouse can be used to house all data, including smaller data sets and operational data, and be used to support casual use, for queries, reports, and digital dashboards, as well as support the analytic platforms. Smaller data marts can be created from the data warehouse to enable faster querying and typical queries from casual users.

Microsoft SQL Server is a(n)

DBMS for midrange computers.

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?

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.

Describe the ways in which database technologies could be used by an office stationery supply company to achieve low-cost leadership

Sales databases could be used to make the supply chain more efficient and minimize warehousing and transportation costs. You can also use sales databases, as well as text mining and sentiment analysis, to determine what supplies are in demand by which customers and whether needs are different in different geographical areas. Business intelligence databases 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.

To analyze unstructured data, such as memos and legal cases, you would use text mining tools.

TRUE

To perform multidimensional data analysis, you would use OLAP.

TRUE

Identify and describe three basic operations used to extract useful sets of data from a relational database.

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.

Complicated groupings of data in a relational database need to be adjusted to eliminate awkward many-to-many relationships.

True

DBMS have a data definition capability to specify the structure of the content of the database.

True

Databases record information about general categories of information referred to as entities.

True

NoSQL technologies are used to manage sets of data that don't require the flexibility of tables and relations.

True

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?

data inconsistency

The specialized language programmers use to add and change data in the database is called

data manipulation language

Detecting and correcting data in a database or file that are incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted, or redundant is called

data scrubbing

The special organizational function whose responsibilities include physical database design and maintenance is called

database administration

Which of the following is not a DBMS for midrange computers?

microsoft Access

Which of the following features enables a DBMS to reduce data redundancy and inconsistency?

minimizes isolated files with repeated data

The traditional file environment does not typically have a problem with

program-data independence.

The policies and processes for managing the integrity and security of data in a firm are referred to as data governance.

true

In place of application server software to allow a Web server to communicate with a back-end database, you can use

CGI

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?

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.

The join operation

combines relational tables to provide the user with more information than is otherwise available.

With in-memory computing, a computer's primary memory (RAM) is used for processing.

TRUE

You can manipulate data on a Web server by using a CGI script.

TRUE

________ tools are used to analyze large unstructured data sets, such as e-mail, memos, survey responses, etc., to discover patterns and relationships.

Text mining

HTML has become the preferred method of communicating with back-end databases because it is a cross-platform language.

FALSE

In data mining, the technique of predicting uses a series of existing values to determine what other future values will be.

FALSE

Multiple data marts are combined and streamlined to create a data warehouse.

FALSE

OLAP is unable to manage and handle queries with very large sets of data.

FALSE

Relational DBMSs use key field rules to ensure that relationships between coupled tables remain consistent.

False

The DBMS programming language that end users and programmers use to manipulate data in the database is called CGI.

False

Which of the following technologies would you use to analyze the social media data collected by a major online retailer?

Hadoop

The project operation

creates a subset consisting of columns in a table.

Which of the following is not a method for performing a data quality audit?

surveying data definition and query files

The logical and physical views of data are separated in a DBMS.

true

The organizational function that is in charge of policies and procedures for managing internal data resources is called data administration.

true

A physical view shows data as it is actually organized and structured on the data storage media.

True

An attribute is a characteristic or quality used to describe a particular entity.

True

The select operation

creates a subset consisting of all records in the file that meet stated criteria.

The data dictionary serves as an important data management tool by

creating an inventory of the data elements contained in the database.

An automated or manual file that stores information about data elements and data characteristics such as usage, physical representation, ownership, authorization, and security is the

data dictionary.

DBMSs typically include report-generating tools in order to

display data in an easier-to-read format.

Data cleansing not only corrects errors but also

enforces consistency among different sets of data.

A database record is a grouping of characters into a word, a group of words, or a complete number.

false

Data scrubbing is a more intensive corrective process than data cleansing.

false

A data warehouse is composed of

historic and current internal data

You work for a retail clothing chain whose primary outlets are in shopping malls, and you 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

identifying sequences.

When the same attribute in related data files has different values, this is called data

inconsistency

A field identified in a record as holding the unique identifier for that record is called the

key field

In a relational database, a record is referred to in technical terms as a(n)

tuple

Describe the ways in which database technologies could be used by a toy manufacturer to achieve product differentiation.

Product databases could be made available to customers for greater convenience and ordering online. Databases could be used to track customer preferences and to help anticipate customer desires. Sales databases could also help clients such as toy stores anticipate when they would need to re-supply, providing an additional service. Data mining, Web mining, and sentiment analysis of big data could help anticipate trends in sales or other factors to help determine new services and products to sell to clients.

List and describe three main capabilities or tools of a DBMS.

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

List at least three conditions that contribute to data redundancy and inconsistency.

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.