Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Scotland 3 day trip Itinerary


Following is our 3 full day itinerary -
Some notes
1. Itinerary was planned keeping in mind family needs - 2 adults and a kid of 3 years.
2. Wanted to do a bit of walking as well, which we did in an unplanned way at Luss.
3. Though it was May, it was still fairly cold in some places

Day 1 (landed at Glasgow from Gatwick, hired a car from the airport)

  1. Loch Lomond Luss, Argyll and Bute G83
  2. Oban PA34
  3. Kinlochleaven PH50 - nice drive
  4. Glen Coe A82 - must visit.
  5. Fort William PH33  - can be avoided
This was the view from Luss

Day 2

  1. Ben Nevis - must visit.
  2. Fort augustus
  3. Loch Ness
  4. Inverness - Stayed here. Did the Dolphin cruise. No dolphins. The season is Aug onwards.


Day 3

  1. Cairncorm-fenicular railway not done
  2. St Andrews not done
  3. Pitloclry - beautiful views. must visit.
  4. Killicrankie - nice Scottish town
  5. Sterling - lovely castle. great views, easy stopover. Did not enter the castle. Don't really think there is a need
Dropped the car off at the airport, flight at 7 pm.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

CBIP - questions

Just took my CBIP exam in data management. It was my last exam and guess what, got a 69%. Again, it was tough. The questions are generally tricky with the NOT IN category. e.g. Which of the following is not a relevant for data integrity.

There was another question, which was one of the following do we don't consider while defining a primary key
1. whether the key is dependent on non-key elements
2. key values are unique
3. the same primary key is not defined in another entity
4. some other criterion

Here, the question is not what conditions are SATISFIED when defining a primary key, but what conditions are CONSIDERED. Meaning we can consider the conditions and arrive on the conclusion that the primary is not a primary key. So, that makes it a valid condition (hence 1, which will tell you that the key is not a primary key). We need to find out a condition which is invalid for primary key definition (hence 3).

Some other questions.
1. Importance of information is measured by which 2 parameters
...
2. An temp(there was another word used, I forget) employee and contractor employee are entities in a org, but an employee can be a temp or a contractor, not both. While modeling subtype, supertype relationship, what is not true.
a. Some data belongs to temp entity only and some data belongs to contractor employee entity only
b. employee is a supertype
c. temp entity and contractor entity are exclusive subtypes
d. ...

3. domain type is the same as
a. ...
b...
c...
d. class word

4. Who is a data intemediary

5. What is the full form of PDCA

6. what is data definition commonly referred to as
a...
b...
c. metadata
d...

7. What is the first training activity for a new joinee to a DM team
a. data stewardship
b. enterprise model
c. system appreciation
d. data model

8. what is the difference between data administrator and database administrator

9. What is the most time consuming activity during data modeling
a. defining attributes, entities, relationships
b. determining stakeholders and business smes
c. defining scope
d. ...

9. In which notation is relationship represented as diamond
a. chen notation
b. idefx1
c. NIAM

10. What is data accuracy

11. Data accuracy is measured in
a. %correct
b. %complete
c... d...

11. What is not a domain type
a. city
b. code
c. name
d. quantity

12. What is the format for attribute naming convention
a. business term + domain + class word (not sure if this the right answer)

13. What should not be done for naming entities
a. use underscore
b. use complete business term
d. use plurals

14. What is not the benefit of Joint Application design/development
a. Project planning
b. for programmers during system development
c. for system compatibility while preparing for a dbms upgrade

15. What is on the columns of Zachmann Framework

16. Parent child relationship is representation of which database
a. relational
b. heirarchical
c. network
d...

17. How is RDBMS more flexible than network and heirarchical database

18. Marketing of data management should be done to
a. business team
b. it team
c. all the organization
d...

19. Authorization is required for
a. for allowing people to access systems
b. determining the level and type of access to be given
c.

20. How are the reponsibilities of user captured in Policy document
a. verb
b. adjective
c. noun
d...

21 conceptual model helps to
a. show things in real world scenarios
b...
c. capture model in abstract ideas

22. difference between enterprise model and logical model

23. What should not be the approach while presenting a data model to the management
a. show all attributes, entities, relationships
b. hide the complexity to present a simple understable view of the organization

24. Derived data is redundant because
a. it is calculated
b. it is transformed from one or more primitive attributes
c. it has the same name as primitive attribute
d. it is represented multiple times

25. an entity referring to one or more instances of itself is called
a. recursive
b... c... d...

26. which of the following is a likely entity
a. vendor
b. employee_id
c. customername
d. order_no

27. Employee name, dept id and name is present in a table. it is a violation of
a. 1 normal
b. 2 norm
c. 3 norm
d. boyce codd norm

28. meta data is defined as
a. data dictionary
b. data about data

29. state transition diagrams

Ramayana play in 15 minutes for kids

This is a Ramayana script I and a few others wrote to explain the mythology behind Diwali to school kids in UK. The play runs for 15 minutes and is supported by audio visuals projected on a screen. The play ends with a dance performance with Ram, Sita and people of Ayodhya dancing with lights celebrating Ram's return on Diwali.

The videos are here (first 5 minutes lost)