I've got a technical interview for a data warehouse architect role on
Friday and I was wondering if people might be able to suggest what sort
of questions I might expect? I'm reasonable confident I'm capable of
handling the role, but not having had an interview in a few years I'm
obviously a little rusty and preparation is always a good thing.
I don't know a huge amount about the role, but I do know they'll be using SQL Server for it. So what sort of knowledge would you expect a SQL Server data warehouse architect to have, if you were hiring one?
I would presume you ought to know about federation (and other scaling techniques) and denormalization and all that OLAP shit (the OLAP thingummy, maybe the reporting thingy).
Yeah, I think it would all revolved around OLAP.
Now, are they doing any SQL Server 2005 stuff? Things have changed a bit in that product.
Depending on who's doing the interview and how serious they are:
-Describe advantages of the CIF architecture versus the bus architecture with conformed dimensions. Which would fit best in our environment given [some parameters they give you] and why
-Describe snowflaking
-Describe factless fact tables.
-Draw a star schema of our business
-Describe common optimization techniques applied at the data model level
-How do you handle data rejects in a warehouse architecture?
-Describe common techniques for loading from the staging area to the warehouse when you only have a small window.
-How do you load type 1 dimensions
-How do you load type 2 dimensions, and how would you load it given our [insert business particularity]
-How would you model unbalanced hierarchies
-How would you model cyclic relations
-What major elements would you include in an audit model?
-How would you implement traceability?
etc...
Edit: If they focus on your SQL Server expertise they don't know what they are doing. If you can't answer all of the above in great details you might still get the job but you're in danger in creating some form of data dump that people often call warehouse which needs to be replaced early on (It's ok, it gives me a job
)
If needed, I can recommend all the necessary reading.
I don't know a huge amount about the role, but I do know they'll be using SQL Server for it. So what sort of knowledge would you expect a SQL Server data warehouse architect to have, if you were hiring one?
I would presume you ought to know about federation (and other scaling techniques) and denormalization and all that OLAP shit (the OLAP thingummy, maybe the reporting thingy).
Yeah, I think it would all revolved around OLAP.
Now, are they doing any SQL Server 2005 stuff? Things have changed a bit in that product.
Depending on who's doing the interview and how serious they are:
-Describe advantages of the CIF architecture versus the bus architecture with conformed dimensions. Which would fit best in our environment given [some parameters they give you] and why
-Describe snowflaking
-Describe factless fact tables.
-Draw a star schema of our business
-Describe common optimization techniques applied at the data model level
-How do you handle data rejects in a warehouse architecture?
-Describe common techniques for loading from the staging area to the warehouse when you only have a small window.
-How do you load type 1 dimensions
-How do you load type 2 dimensions, and how would you load it given our [insert business particularity]
-How would you model unbalanced hierarchies
-How would you model cyclic relations
-What major elements would you include in an audit model?
-How would you implement traceability?
etc...
Edit: If they focus on your SQL Server expertise they don't know what they are doing. If you can't answer all of the above in great details you might still get the job but you're in danger in creating some form of data dump that people often call warehouse which needs to be replaced early on (It's ok, it gives me a job
)If needed, I can recommend all the necessary reading.
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