What are the potential drawbacks of normalization in database design?
- Decreased redundancy
- Difficulty in maintaining data integrity
- Increased complexity
- Slower query performance
Normalization in database design can lead to increased complexity due to the need for multiple tables and relationships. This can make querying and understanding the database more difficult. Additionally, it can result in slower query performance as joins are required to retrieve related data.
How does data profiling contribute to the data cleansing process?
- By analyzing the structure, content, and quality of data to identify issues and inconsistencies.
- By applying predefined rules to validate the accuracy of data.
- By generating statistical summaries of data for analysis purposes.
- By transforming data into a standard format for consistency.
Data profiling plays a crucial role in the data cleansing process by analyzing the structure, content, and quality of data to identify issues, anomalies, and inconsistencies. It involves examining metadata, statistics, and sample data to gain insights into data patterns, distributions, and relationships. By profiling data, data engineers can discover missing values, outliers, duplicates, and other data quality issues that need to be addressed during the cleansing process. Data profiling helps ensure that the resulting dataset is accurate, consistent, and fit for its intended purpose.
Scenario: A database administrator notices that the database's index fragmentation is high, leading to decreased query performance. What steps would you take to address this issue?
- Drop and recreate indexes to rebuild them from scratch.
- Implement index defragmentation using an ALTER INDEX REORGANIZE statement.
- Rebuild indexes to remove fragmentation and reorganize storage.
- Use the DBCC INDEXDEFRAG command to defragment indexes without blocking queries.
Rebuilding indexes to remove fragmentation and reorganize storage is a common strategy for addressing high index fragmentation. This process helps to optimize storage and improve query performance by ensuring that data pages are contiguous and reducing disk I/O operations.
Scenario: You are tasked with cleansing a dataset containing customer information. How would you handle missing values in the "Age" column?
- Flag missing values for further investigation
- Impute missing values based on other demographic information
- Remove rows with missing age values
- Replace missing values with the mean or median age
When handling missing values in the "Age" column, one approach is to impute the missing values based on other demographic information such as gender, location, or income. This method utilizes existing data patterns to estimate the missing values more accurately. Replacing missing values with the mean or median can skew the distribution, while removing rows may result in significant data loss. Flagging missing values for further investigation allows for manual review or additional data collection if necessary.
Which of the following is a key consideration when designing data transformation pipelines for real-time processing?
- Batch processing and offline analytics
- Data governance and compliance
- Data visualization and reporting
- Scalability and latency control
When designing data transformation pipelines for real-time processing, scalability and latency control are key considerations to ensure the system can handle varying workloads efficiently and provide timely results.
An index seek operation is more efficient than a full table scan because it utilizes ________ to locate the desired rows quickly.
- Memory buffers
- Pointers
- Seek predicates
- Statistics
An index seek operation utilizes seek predicates to locate the desired rows quickly based on the index key values, resulting in efficient data retrieval compared to scanning the entire table.
What is the main purpose of Apache Hive in the Hadoop ecosystem?
- Data storage and retrieval
- Data visualization and reporting
- Data warehousing and querying
- Real-time stream processing
Apache Hive facilitates data warehousing and querying in the Hadoop ecosystem by providing a SQL-like interface for managing and querying large datasets stored in HDFS or other compatible file systems.
In a distributed database system, what are some common techniques for achieving data consistency?
- Lambda architecture, Event sourcing, Data lake architectures, Data warehousing
- MapReduce algorithms, Bloom filters, Key-value stores, Data sharding
- RAID configurations, Disk mirroring, Clustering, Replication lag
- Two-phase commit protocol, Quorum-based replication, Vector clocks, Version vectors
Achieving data consistency in a distributed database system requires employing various techniques. Some common approaches include the two-phase commit protocol, which ensures all nodes commit or abort a transaction together, maintaining consistency across distributed transactions. Quorum-based replication involves requiring a certain number of replicas to agree on an update before committing, enhancing fault tolerance and consistency. Vector clocks and version vectors track causality and concurrent updates, enabling conflict resolution and consistency maintenance in distributed environments. These techniques play a vital role in ensuring data integrity and coherence across distributed systems.
In a graph NoSQL database, relationships between data entities are represented using ________.
- Columns
- Documents
- Nodes
- Tables
In a graph NoSQL database, relationships between data entities are represented using nodes. Nodes represent entities, and relationships between them are established by connecting these nodes through edges. This graph-based structure enables efficient traversal and querying of interconnected data.
What is HBase in the context of the Hadoop ecosystem?
- A data integration framework
- A data visualization tool
- A distributed, scalable database for structured data
- An in-memory caching system
HBase is a distributed, scalable, NoSQL database built on top of Hadoop. It provides real-time read/write access to large datasets, making it suitable for applications requiring random, real-time access to data.