Changed-Fact Drills & Readiness
The exam often changes one fact and therefore the best answer. Practice noticing the pivot.
8 changed-fact drills
1 — Storage
Original: five years of integrated history/trends → DW.
Changed: only current integrated status refreshed every few minutes → ODS.
Flip: history requirement became latency/current-state requirement.
2 — Architecture
Original: normalized enterprise warehouse feeds marts → Inmon/CIF.
Changed: incremental dimensional marts share Product/Date → Kimball.
Flip: enterprise integration mechanism changed.
3 — CDC
Original: reliable timestamps, no delete requirement → timestamp delta plausible.
Changed: physical deletes required and DB transaction logs available → transaction-log CDC stronger.
Flip: required evidence changed.
4 — Latency
Original: nightly batch meets morning reporting need → batch remains reasonable.
Changed: fraud decision requires seconds → justified low-latency/streaming or other real-time path.
Flip: decision latency changed materially.
5 — Data handling
Original: valid source currency converted under target rule → transformation.
Changed: value is malformed/invalid → remediation becomes primary.
Flip: valid-but-different became defective.
6 — BI trust
Original: definitions governed, queries slow → performance/physical tuning.
Changed: queries fast, same KPI defined differently → semantic governance/Metadata/stewardship.
Flip: service defect became meaning/trust defect.
7 — Production readiness
Original: pilot works but security/monitoring/support/release controls incomplete → keep pilot/sandbox.
Changed: acceptance and controls complete → production promotion may be appropriate.
Flip: readiness gate is now satisfied.
8 — Metrics
Original: 500 licenses, 45 active users → usage/adoption.
Changed: usage high, but only Sales and Finance subjects exist despite enterprise roadmap → subject-area coverage.
Flip: management question changed from adoption to breadth.
60-second readiness checklist
Can you, without notes: 1. explain Inmon and Kimball in two sentences each? 2. classify staging, ODS, DW, mart and cube? 3. choose among five CDC methods from source evidence? 4. distinguish trickle, messaging and streaming by accumulation point? 5. write the six DW/BI activities in order? 6. separate mapping, remediation and transformation? 7. choose optimistic vs pessimistic loading? 8. identify the BI user/tool family from decision/time-horizon clues? 9. explain why Metadata/lineage and UAT are trust controls? 10. choose usage, coverage, performance or satisfaction metrics?
Ten-minute cram order
- Inmon/Kimball + storage roles.
- CDC + low-latency patterns.
- Six activities + mapping/remediation/transformation/population.
- BI user/tool families + self-service/OLAP.
- Metadata/lineage + product lifecycle + metrics.
Source anchor: pp. 361–393.