Advice on the End-of-Chapter Exercises
Use the case study as a discussion point. Have students read the case study and present various solutions to the situation as presented. Specific discussion points might include the following:
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What Replication choices does the company have, and which meet the requirements for a high volume of updates?
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What backup choices does the company have, and which meet the requirements to minimize downtime, and minimize data loss if a failure occurs?
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One requirement is to establish referential integrity for replication between warehouses. How can this best be done?
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What Database structure and file placement would be most efficient?
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What would the cost of these various implementations be?
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Let your students know that on the exam there are rarely "interactive" questions, where they will be expected to actually "do" something in Enterprise Manager. This means that for their exam preparation they should pay particular attention to command syntaxknowing what each command does, and the order of any parameters that go with each command. In the majority of cases regarding information in this chapter, they will be presented with four or five different code snippets and expected to know which is "most correct." A strategy for them to employ when faced with this type of question is to read the question, and ensure they understand what is being asked. Then, look at each code snippet. Identify the common parts of each snippet (what is the same). Then identify the "one" part of each snippet that is different. In many cases the answers will be in the following pattern:
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Concept A, Concept B, Concept C, Concept D
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Concept A, Concept E, Concept F, Concept D
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Concept A, Concept B, Concept F, Concept D
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Concept A, Concept E, Concept C, Concept D
What the student needs to do is identify that Concepts A and D are superfluous. The most correct answer hinges on whether Concepts B or E, and Concepts C or F are correct. So, for example, if the student "knows" that B is more correct than E, but is unsure of whether C is more correct than F, they have raised their chance of getting the correct answer 50% by eliminating Answers B and D.