1. What is the purpose of reporting?

That is more self-explanatory than previous questions. Ability to view or create report by users is the short answer but usually reporting tools like SSRS are much more powerful and they allow to set up subscriptions, provider reports in different usable for users format, secure reports and so on.

2. What is the purpose of ETL (Extract Transform Load)?

ETL (Extract Transform Load) is used to extract data from various sources. Transform the data which means applying business rules and performing data cleaning (the latter being often overlooked that causes issues) and Load the clean data into data warehouse. Sometimes in ETL there is also master data management element so it can extract data, perform transformation and it may use proper tools to perform data cleansing and check business rules. In recent versions of SQL Server (including 2012) we can have Master Data Services (MDS) and Data Qaulity Services (DQS).

3. Tell me what is the purpose of cubes?

Cubes allow to store larges amounts (usually track history) of data and get very good performance. Security is very detailed and it can be applied on "member level" which is an individual value in a column. Cubes usually track history so user get access to "point in time" data and accurate data. My favorite example is top 1 customer that moves its location from London to Bristol with cubes (or more data warehouses) historic data will not move to Bristol and it will remain in London which is very often not the case in providing reporting information from operational systems.

4. What are the main areas (or tools) that represent Business Intelligence?

This is open question and answers will vary but the candidate might say ETL (SSIS), Data Warehouse and Cubes (SSAS) and Reporting (SSRS). This list can be longer and can include data mining, master data management, data profiling, data cleansing, analysis and data gathering also can be added here.

5. What is the mean of BOMain.Key in business intelligence?

A BOMain.key file contains all relevant information about the repository. It contains the address of the repository security domain.

6. Tell me what is object qualification?

Object qualification is an attribute of an object that helps to determine how it can be used in multidimensional analysis.

7. What is slicing in business objects?

Slicing and dicing of business objects is used for a detailed analysis of the data. It allows changing the position of data by interchanging rows and columns.

8. Do you know what is SAS?

SAS BI provides the information about an enterprise when needed. It provides this information in customized format. SAS BI integrates data across the enterprise and delivers the self-service reporting and analysis. This consumes less time for responding requests and for business uses to view the information. An integrated, flexible and robust presentation layer for SAS Analytics with full breadth is also offered by SAS BI. All these are integrated within the context of business for better and faster decision making.

9. Explain business intelligence Dashboard?

Dashboard in business intelligence is used for rapid prototyping, cloning and deployment for all databases, operational applications or spread sheets through an organization.
A dashboard in BI allows an enterprise's status/position, heading to, by using graphs, maps and chars. The drill-down and roll-over capabilities allows organizing things without revealing important information. It is fully customizable, including free-form design options. Dashboard consolidates vital statistics of business into an easy-to-read page.

10. Tell me what is batch processing in business objects?

Batch processing can be used to schedule reports. Objects can be also be used for batch processing. Batch processing can be used to also select the objects to be processed.

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