Category Archives: Interview

Teradata India – a sorry picture inside

Interview, Teradata

Teradata is said to be the best back-end as far as MicroStrategy is concerned. Most of MSTR people I know, they have Teradata as the back-end. FYI, Walmart has the biggest implementation of MicroStrategy with more than 100 boxes of Teradata.

Now cut short to Teradata India, which is mainly involved in selling the Teradata boxes and then co-selling its consulting services (After all database requires some front-end to make use of it). My several freinds who are client side from Teradata have bitter experience. Teradata is just concerned about selling their boxes and letting employee “manage” things at client side of it own. Lots of people are working under duress.

They keep on advertising about MSTR position almost round the year but I fail to understand why their experience MSTR resources are working on different technology or worse on bench.

Last and the serious bomb. There is set targets for employees about Teradata certification. Obviously you need not pay for it. But, if you do not achieve it, you may get no raise at all. One of my friend’s friend was so busy with the work (he did a great job) that it was impossible for him to remove time and do the certification. You get a bomb that there is no raise as you have not completed any certification.

If you are planning to join Teradata, do a good due diligence.

MicroStrategy Interview Questions 101

Interview, MicroStrategy

1. What is metadata?

2. What is two-tier connection?

3. What is three-tier connection?

4. What is difference between 2 and 3 tier connection?

5. What is ScanMD?

6. What is MD Doctor?

7. What is clustering?

8. How do you achieve schema object version control (similar to VSS)?

9. What are different kinds of objects in MicroStrategy?

10. How will you reset password of all users?

11. What are different modes you can run I-Server?

12. How can you make sure that I-Server would be running even if the application mode has crashed and how to get back the instance?

13. What is the difference between RW document and HTML document?

14. What are various authentication modes?

15. How can you configure WH authentication?

16. Does DLS affects MicroStrategy? What you need to do incorporate it?

17. What’s smart metric?

18. What’s fact table?

19. What is fact constellation schema? What is star schema? What is snowflake schema?

20. Should you have DATE as ID attribute form?

21. What is compound key?

22. What is a bridge/relationship table?

23. How will you resolve double counting in M-M relationship between two attributes?

24. What is Object Manager?

25. What will you do when I-Server crashes?

26. Where is Administrator’s password stored? Is it stored in encrypted?

27. What will you do if your Administrator has forgotten password or the account is locked?

28. How can you monitor the error received while running I-Server and report?

29. What is a surrogate key?

30. Why do we use a staging area?

31. Why do we need a DW?

32. Why do we use dimensional modeling in DW? Why not Relational?

33. How much history should we have in a DW?

34. What are the most important tables in a DW?

35. What is a fact and an attribute?

36. What is a batch?

37. Diferences between ROLAP, MOLAP and HOLAP?

38. What is a CUBE?

39. Why Kimball? Why not Inmon? Or vice versa? 😉

40. Performance with a relational based query vs dimensional?

41. What is ETL?

42. What types of DW’s are most common abroad?

43. How many MSTR projects have you worked? Explain in detail.

44. Tell us about your Roles & Responsibilities in your project.

45. Have you managed any team for MSTR project?

46. What are the two types of schemas available in DW?

47. Difference between Star schema and Snowflake schema.

48. What schema is used in your project? Why?

49. What are conformed dimensions?

50. What are Factless facts?

51. Explain 2-tier and 3-tier Architecture in MSTR including pros and cons.

52. What is 4-tier architecture?

53. What architecture is used in your project? Why?

54. What are the types of MSTR objects available?

55. Explain Schema objects. (One by one)

56. Have you created any Facts, Attributes for your project? How?

57. What are Transformations? Is there any transformations implemented in your project? Explain the example from your project.

58. What are the features available for MSTR Intelligence Server?

59. Explain Fact Structure. (4 types, one by one)

60. Explain Level Extension. How it is used in your project?

61. Explain Fact Relation.

62. Explain Fact Degradation.

63. Difference between View Filter and Report Filter.

64. What are the different types of Filters available? Explain each with example.

65. What is derived metrics? Explain the example from your project.

66. What is Compound Key Attribute? Give example from your project.

67. Explain VLDB properties in detail.

68. Similar to Visual SourceSafe (VSS) for version controlling, HOW can we achieve the same for Objects in MSTR?

69. Give the step-by-step approach followed for Testing MSTR reports, both from MSTR Desktop and MSTR Web.

70. Have you done any Estimation for MSTR reports?

71. How will you differentiate Simple, Medium and Complex reports while doing estimation for MSTR reports?

72. How to use Templates in MSTR?

73. What are Prompted Filters?

74. What is Bridge table?

75. Where will you customize the display for Null Values?

76. Explain the step-by-step technical approach after you get the Requirements from the Client.

Will be updating as and when I think of more questions. This is my list of question I generally ask if ask to interview a candidate. But keep in mind, this is just for initial cut off. Second round will have unique practical questions. Depends upon how much you have got to explore MicroStrategy.