Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani Distance Learning Programmes Division First Semester 2008-2009 Comprehensive Examination

(EC-2 Regular) Course No. Course Title Nature of Exam Weightage Duration Date of Exam Note:
1. 2.

: SS ZG515 : DATA WAREHOUSING : Open Book : 60% : 3 Hours : 27/09/2008 (AN)

No. of Pages =1 No. of Questions = 5

Please follow all the Instructions to Candidates given on the cover page of the answer book. All parts of a question should be answered consecutively. Each answer should start from a fresh page.

Q.1 Q.2

Explain in detail, the kind of things RDBMS vendors are doing to make their product more suitable for data warehousing & OLAP. [10] In a university data warehouse, give a star schema to capture the attendance of students in different courses. It is required to generate a report that would give the semester wise percentage attendance in different courses. Suggest any aggregate(s) that would facilitate in generation of this report. Give aggregated schemas also. It is given that the average attendance in courses is 50%. Percentage attendance = Ni /(Total no. of students x Total no. of lectures) Where Ni is the no. of students attending ith lecture [10]

Q.3

Why it is important to have a time dimension in a data warehouse? What makes time dimension different from other dimensions? What points should be kept in mind while designing the time dimension? [10] In a university data warehouse, how would you model the grades of students, as a fact or as a dimension? Give a detailed justification in support of your answer. Also design a star schema that would capture for each semester, the grades of students in different courses. (Assume BITS education model) [10] A Direct-to-home (DTH) TV company wants to build a data warehouse to analyze data that they have collected over the years. They have a huge base of customers all over India. The customers are basically households in different parts of the country. The country is divided into four regions (N, S, E, & W). The company offers 100+ channels which are clubbed into different packages and there are some core channels which are part of every package. Each package has a different rate. The company offers different subscription models (monthly, half yearly, & yearly). From time to time the company offers some promotional schemes to its existing and potential customers. The company keeps track of all the subscriptions sold and their current status (new, old, & discontinued). The subscriptions are sold through agents. The company wants to design some tailor-made packages for households based on the composition of the households (elderly men, elderly women, adult males, adult females, teenagers, & kids) and their demographics. You are required to design a data warehouse for the DTH company. First do a detailed analysis requirement and combine it with the above information provided to you to come up with a detailed star schema. Use all the advanced dimensional modeling techniques you have learnt in the course to model the above case study. You are allowed to distort the classical star schema, but give proper justification for doing so. Suggest a suitable aggregation and partitioning strategy. Give example tuples for each relation you have in your design. [10 + 4 + 4 + 2 = 20]

Q.4

Q.5