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

CBIP - more questions

Answers to some more CBIP questions that I got through mail recently. I was recently reading your posts on CBIP examination that you took in Nov-2008. It was good to know your experience and hope its proving beneficial for your career now. I have my first exam - Core IT on 17th April and have just started studying for it. I was wondering if you I can help me clarify few doubts please::

1) How much study Core IT exam demands - I am have basic understanding of the Information Systems and familiar with the technical terminologies like Storage Management, Networking Concepts , Computer Architecture but NOT at all with datawarehouse concepts.

Answer - Core IT exam is not DWH specific. I searched online for INformation Systems, IT basic/fundamental tests. found about 5-6 of them, which were free and quite useful.there are a lot of soft questions as well about how to manage teams, how will you approach conflict/problems, how to plan, but these are pretty straight forward to answer.

2) Any specific books you can recommend? I have purchased the Exam Guide but that lists lot on study material which I think is not possible to go through in 2-3 weeks. If you can suggest few books that covers major portion of the exam that will be very helpful.

Answer - I found the top 3-4 books suggested in the study guide from the library. If your company has an online books resource like books 24x7, then it is extremely useful as well..

3) Last - Is 90 minutes sufficient to answer 110 questions? Or one needs to hurry from the first question itself? Are questions easy to understand?

Answer - Yes, it is is sufficient. but you need to keep time.

CBIP recognition in UK

From my experience, it seems that there isn't enough recognition of the CBIP certification in the UK. The best measure of this is to compare the number of data warehouse / BI jobs advertised here in the UK and US.

In the US
Lets try Monster - It throws 3 jobs with CBIP as a requirement or prefered

At Jobster - it has 7


In the UK
Monster - 0

At IT Job Board - 0

Any given day, you will find similar trend - definitely recognized in the US, but not in UK. Wonder why that is? Not enough marketing/awareness building by TDWI

CDMP using CBIP

The credits you get on CBIP can be transferred to get CDMP - Certified Data Management Professional. Most speciality exams on CBIP are valid to get a CDMP. All you have to do is to contact ICCP or DAMA, send an application to transfer the credit (admin cost $50).

CDMP is conducted by ICCP and DAMA (Data Management Association)
Previous posts on CBIP 1, 2 and 3

CBIP certificate

I have received my CBIP certificate. My marks for the three exams are 69, 67 and 71. Which means, I have missed the expert level certification by a fraction (70 in each exam).

The certificate is fantastic - bound in a folder, with detailed assessment for each group of questions.

Hope it counts for something.

People needing help with the type of questions asked etc, mail me (atoras at gmail). Please go through my previous posts on the subject. 1, 2

CBIP certified professional - third paper update

Finally gave my third paper - data management. And guess what, I passed. Just missed the mastery level by a whisker. But its fine. Overall, I think the exam was tough and I did well.

I took the exam by remote proctoring. I am not sure of the extent of control of your laptop that the proctor has, I mean, to what extent he checks on programs open on your laptop/pc. I played it safe and didn't have any reading material on the laptop or paper. Anyway, there is hardly any time to refer to notes as you have to answer 110 questions in 90 minutes. That's less than a minute for a question.

Some of the questions didn't make sense, but overall the exam did test your knowledge of the domain quite rigorously. I have jotted down areas that are not that common but brought about a lot of questions. Will write in subsequent posts.

Previous Post

CBIP preparation - my experience

Recently took 2 papers of CBIP. CBIP is Certified Business Intelligence Professional. You can specialize in a number of streams - details here but you have to take 2 main papers - Core exam and Data warehousing.

Core exam is about general IT fundaes - software engineering, hardware, program management, processes, system design etc.
Data warehousing about the basics of data warehousing which any BI professional would be expected to know.

Though I was relatively free and had loads of time for preparation, let me tell you it is extremely hard to prepare. One, because the scope is vast. You are not expected to deep dive, but cover a lot of different areas and topics. There is lot of stuff that you would obviously know, but then there would be some basic terminology that you might have forgotten or never come across due to the nature of your work. eg. RAID (in networking), SDRAM, Gantt chart etc. So, you do have to ensure you cover all those subject areas and atleast get a basic understanding of these terminologies. But again, due to the questions being multiple choice and mostly of the nature, "What is XYZ NOT used for?", you just can't rely on the basic understanding but actually have to go into the details as well. Thats why I am in a major confused state during the preparation - to skim over to cover all the topics or get into the details to ensure you can trick those trick questions.

Overall, I would rate the tests as tough. It will be difficult to pass without ANY preparation, even though you might be top of the class IT and BI professional. With a week's preparation, it is easy to pass, though to get the MASTERY level (70%) in each test, 2 week full time preparation is mandatory.

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