Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions You Should Prepare

Business Intelligence Engineers improve the growth of a business by providing intelligent business decisions, helping in financial planning, and improving general customer experience. They also share understandable and clean data used efficiently to create KPIs.

The average base pay of a BIE in the US is $103,719, with an additional cash compensation of $21,014. This article focuses on Business Intelligence Engineer interview questions to help you prepare for your next BIE interview. Read ahead to learn more!

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In this article, we’ll cover:

• Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions and Answers
• Sample Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions for Practice
• Top Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions for Experienced Professionals
• FAQs on Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions

Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions and Answers

We’ll begin with some sample Business Intelligence Engineer interview questions and answers to get a basic idea of what to expect.

Q1. What’s a pivot table?

A pivot table is a popular data processing tool in the form of a 2-D table. This 2-D table summarizes large volumes of data and lets users easily change how the data is displayed. Business intelligence analysts can discover insights from huge datasets more quickly with the help of a pivot table.

Q2. What are aggregates?

Aggregates are a type of data found in the aggregate table. Aggregate functions are used to find various aggregates. Some of these values include max, min, count, average, and so on.

Q3. Name some uses for data warehouses.

Data warehouses are separate databases serving long-term storage and storing data outside an operational database. They’re the place all past data analysis is consolidated. They are often used in analytics for tactical reporting, exploratory data analysis, or data validation.

Q4. What do the terms OLAP, DOLAP, MOLAP, HOLAP, and ROLAP stand for?

OLAP stands for On-Line Analytical Processing, and the OLAP in DOLAP, MOLAP, HOLAP, and ROLAP stands for the same. So DOLAP stands for Desktop OLAP, MOLAP is short for Multidimensional OLAP, ROLAP stands for Relational OLAP, and HOLAP is short for Hybridization of OLAP.

Q5. Name the kinds of JOIN functions in SQL.

Some types of joins in SQL are right, inner, left, and outer.

Learn about the Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Process here.

Sample Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions for Practice

Here are some Business Intelligence Engineer interview questions. Ensure you can solve them before your interview:

1. Differentiate between OLTP and OLAP. What are they, and what are their purposes?
2. State some methods we can use for performance tuning and query optimization.
3. How would you explain a join to a non-tech adult?
4. How can we calculate variance in PCA?
5. State the assumptions made in a random forest model.
6. Explain the concept of a data or OLAP cube.
7. What are fact and dimension tables?
8. Name the pros and cons of the BI tools you have used.
9. State the key responsibilities of a BI developer.
10. What is the purpose of BI?

Recommended Reading: How to Prepare for Amazon’s Business Intelligence Engineer Interview

Top Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions for Experienced Professionals

Let’s move a step further with some Business Intelligence Engineer interview questions for experienced professionals:

1. 1. What is a foreign key relationship?
   2. Name the steps necessary to implement company BI analytics from the ground up.
   3. How would you join two given order tables using the where clause?

1. What is a data mart, and when is it appropriate to use them instead of a single data warehouse?
2. Name some advantages of data normalization.
3. Talk about the star schema and snowflake schema.
4. State some advantages of data denormalization.
5. If you have two order tables, talk about which join you will use and why.
6. Rank the revenue in the given order table without using the rank function.
7. Design a data model for a tech giant like Uber.
8. What is the solution for slow-running queries in SQL servers?
9. Differentiate between a dimension and a fact table.

We hope this list of Business Intelligence Engineer interview questions will help you crack your tech interview. To learn more about the role, check out our article What Does an Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer Do?

FAQs on Business Intelligence Engineer Interview Questions

Q1. What are the key tasks of a business intelligence engineer?

The five key stages of the tasks a Business Intelligence Engineer does are situation awareness, risk assessment, data sourcing, data analysis, and decision support.

Q2. How much does a Business Intelligence Engineer earn in the US?

The average base pay of a BIE in the US is $103,719, with an additional cash compensation of $21,014.

Q3. What are some of the prominent Business Intelligence tools?

Some of the popular BI tools include Tableau, QlikView, Power BI, Sisense, Zoho Analytics, Dundas BI, SAS, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, and Yellowfin.

Q4. What does a senior business intelligence engineer do?

A senior business intelligence engineer uses business analysis to suggest new profitable business initiatives to execs or senior management. Analyze and generate huge data streams using several inputs. Find and create methods to gauge and evaluate the customer experience to drive business outcomes.

Q5. Differentiate between data science and business intelligence.

Unlike BI, data science mainly focuses on analyzing raw data to find patterns and create forecasts based on the analysis. Business intelligence is more concerned with past and current trends, while data science is more concerned with forecasts and future trends.

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