A3.4 Alternative databases and data warehouses questions for IB Computer Science
43 questions on Alternative databases and data warehouses, written by Augment in the style of IB exam papers. Six of them are below in full, to answer on paper.
- IB Computer Science
- Part of A3 Databases
- HL only
Questions by paper and level
| Paper | Questions |
|---|---|
| Paper 1 | 43 |
Counted on
Questions to try
Written by Augment in the style of IB exams, not past papers. Answer them on paper, then check each one against its markscheme with a free account.
A photo-sharing social media platform stores each user's posts, comments, tags and reactions. Different kinds of post (photo, video, poll, story) carry different sets of fields, and the platform adds new post types every few months.
- (a)
State one type of NoSQL database.
1 mark
- (b)
Outline one reason why a NoSQL document database suits the platform's posts better than a relational database.
2 marks
- (c)
Outline one disadvantage of using a NoSQL database for the platform.
2 marks
A ride-hailing company records the live GPS location of every driver every few seconds. When a passenger requests a ride, the system must find the available drivers closest to the pickup point.
- (a)
Outline what is meant by a spatial database.
2 marks
- (b)
Explain how a spatial database would help the system find nearby drivers quickly.
3 marks
- (c)
Identify two other spatial queries the company could run on its data.
2 marks
An online multiplayer game shows a global leaderboard that is updated after every match. Up to 50 000 matches finish every minute, and players expect their new rank to appear immediately.
- (a)
Outline the main characteristic of an in-memory database.
2 marks
- (b)
Explain why an in-memory database is suitable for the leaderboard.
2 marks
- (c)
Explain one risk of storing the leaderboard only in an in-memory database, and how the risk could be reduced.
3 marks
A small accountancy firm runs its client database on a server in its office. The owner is considering moving the database to a managed cloud database service.
- (a)
Outline what is meant by a cloud database.
2 marks
- (b)
Discuss whether the firm should move its database to the managed cloud service.
4 marks
A national supermarket chain has 300 stores. Each store's till system records every sale in its own operational database. Head office wants to build a data warehouse to analyse sales across the whole chain over the last ten years.
- (a)
Distinguish between the stores' operational databases and the data warehouse.
2 marks
- (b)
State what is meant by data in a data warehouse being subject-oriented.
2 marks
- (c)
Explain why the data must be integrated when it is loaded into the warehouse.
3 marks
- (d)
Explain why the warehouse is described as time-variant.
3 marks
- (e)
Outline one way the warehouse could be designed so that queries over ten years of data run quickly.
2 marks
A bank analyses millions of card payments each day to spot payments that might be fraudulent.
- (a)
Identify the data mining technique that is most suitable for spotting possibly fraudulent payments.
1 mark
- (b)
Explain how the technique identified in part (a) could be used to flag a suspicious payment.
3 marks
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More questions in Databases
- A3.1Database fundamentals
- A3.2Database design
- A3.3Database programming
- A3.4Alternative databases and data warehousesThis page
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