Transforming Business with Information Systems Final Exam Study Notes

Flashcards for Final Exam Study Notes on Transforming Business with Information Systems.

What is a database?

A collection of data organized to service many applications at the same time by storing and managing data so that they appear to be in one location.

How does a relational database organize data?

Organize data into two-dimensional tables (relations) with columns and rows.

What is an Entity in a relational database?

Person, place, thing or event recorded in the database and is usually its own table

What are Attributes in a relational database?

Specific characteristic or quality within a particular entity, usually a column heading.

What is a Primary Key?

A field that uniquely identifies each record in a table.

What is a Foreign Key?

A field used to link tables by linking to a primary key in another table.

What is Normalization in relational databases?

A method for analyzing and reducing a relational database to its most streamlined form to ensure minimum redundancy, maximum data integrity and optimal processing performance.

What is SQL?

A standardized language that all databases should implement, and that all software applications should use.

What is a data model?

A diagram that represents the main items of interest to us (entities) in the database and the relationships that connect them.

What is the difference between logical and physical database design?

Logical design models the database from a business perspective, while physical design is concerned with how data are actually organized and structured on physical storage media.

Define Cardinality in ERDs.

The number of relationships or instances one entity has with another

What is a 'domain' entity type?

An entity that describes a core business element of a database, each domain contains one or more entities.

What do linking entities do?

Changes the cardinality of the relationships – the solution to any ‘many to many’ relationship.

Define Null Values in SQL.

A special marker in SQL to indicate that a value does not exist in the database – in the SQL specification, NULL is defined as “missing information and inapplicable information”

What are lookup values?

Values which complement a domain entity and, most importantly, may NOT always be present in that domain entity.

Why might businesses be more interested in big data?

Big datasets offer more patterns and insights than smaller datasets, for example on customer behaviour and weather patterns.

What is a Data Warehouse?

A central repository of information that stores current and historical data that can be analysed to make more informed decisions.

What is a Data Mart?

A subset of a data warehouse in which a summarised or highly focused portion of the organisation’s data is placed in a separate database for a specific population of users.

What is Data Mining?

Provides insights into business data that cannot be obtained with OLAP by finding hidden patterns and relationships in large databases and inferring rules from them to predict future behaviour.

What is Association in data mining?

A pattern is discovered based on a relationship between items in the same transaction, occurrences linked to a single event.

What is Sequencing in data mining?

Discover or identify similar patterns, regular events or trends in transaction data over a period (e.g. a month, a year etc)

What is classification in data mining?

Patterns describing a group an item belongs to

What is clustering in data mining?

Partitioning a database into groups of customers based on demographics and type of personal investments.

What is forecasting in data mining?

Uses series of values to forecast future values, forecasting finds patterns in data to help managers estimate the future of value continuous variables such as sales figures

What is Hadoop?

An open source framework that is used to efficiently store and process large datasets ranging in size from gigabytes to petabytes of data. Useful for handing unstructured and structured data.

What is OLAP?

An approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries.

What is an OLAP Cube?

A snapshot of data from the production database at a specific point in time, perhaps at the end of a specific day, week, month or year.

What is Predictive Analysis?

Extracts information from data to predict future trends and behaviour patterns

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

The attempt to build computer systems that think and act like humans.

What is an Expert System?

Model human knowledge as a set of rules that are called a knowledge base. Can’t explain how they make decisions.

What is Machine Learning?

Computers improving performance by using algorithms to learn patterns from data and examples. Main focus on finding patterns in data, and classifying data inputs into known (and unknown) outputs.

What do Neural Networks do?

Find patterns and relationships in very large amounts of data. Humans train the network by feeding it a set of outcomes they want the machine to learn.

VLOOKUP: What is 'lookup_value'?

What am I looking at? (E.g. which person you want to find commission for)

VLOOKUP: What is 'table_array'?

Where am I looking for the lookup value in a table? (whole table)

VLOOKUP: What is 'Colindexnum'?

What do I want to get as an outcome? (column of what you're trying to find)

VLOOKUP: What does 'TRUE' mean?

Approximate match (e.g. when looking up a range $100-$200)

VLOOKUP: What does 'FALSE' mean?

Exact match (e.g. a name or a date)

FILTER: What is 'Array'?

Entire list of people/things you’re looking for

FILTER: What is 'Include'?

A specific column that influences the list you’re looking in

What does CONCAT do?

Joins strings of text together

IF: What is a 'Logical Test'?

Using >, >=, <, <=

What does IFERROR do?

If put in the front of a formula such as vlookup, and the function produces an error message, it can display a pre-defined message.

What does the LEFT formula do?

Keeps a select number of letters from left to right

What does the RIGHT formula do?

Keeps a select number of letters from right to left

AVERAGEIF: What is 'Range'?

Column which your lookup value is in

AVERAGEIF: What is 'Criteria'?

Lookup value

AVERAGEIF: What is 'Average range'?

Different column you want to find average of

GOAL SEEK: What is 'Set Cell'?

Cell you want to get specific $ amount of

GOAL SEEK: What is 'To value'?

What value you want displayed in said cell

GOAL SEEK: What is 'By changing cell'?

What cell/cells have to be modified to get that amount (e.g. sales)

SOLVER: What does 'Binary' mean?

Means numbers in the column/row must be either 0 or 1

SOLVER: What does 'Integer (Int)' mean?

Whole number, no points such as 1.1

SOLVER: What does 'Different (Dif)' mean?

If you want each cell in the range to have different values