Data and Analytics Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield Data and Analytics facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. What is a KPI in the context of data visualization? → Key Performance Indicator
2. What does 'schema-on-read' mean in the context of data lakes? → Schema is applied when data is queried, not when it's stored
3. What is the mean of the dataset: 4, 8, 6, 10, 12? → 8
4. In Power BI, what is a 'slicer' used for? → Filtering dashboard visuals interactively by selected values
5. What is Apache Hadoop primarily used for? → Distributed storage and batch processing of large datasets
6. What does 'self-service BI' mean? → Empowering business users to access, analyze, and visualize data without IT assistance
7. What type of correlation does a Pearson coefficient of -0.85 indicate? → Strong negative correlation
8. What is PII in the context of data governance? → Personally Identifiable Information that can identify a specific individual
9. What is the purpose of cross-validation in machine learning? → To assess how well a model generalizes to independent datasets
10. Which visualization tool is most commonly used for business intelligence dashboards in the US? → Tableau
11. What does a z-score of 2.0 indicate? → The value is 2 standard deviations above the mean
12. What is a confusion matrix used to measure? → The counts of true positives, true negatives, false positives, and false negatives
13. What does 'drill down' mean in OLAP analysis? → Moving from a summary view to a more detailed level of data
14. What does the term 'ETL' stand for in data engineering? → Extract, Transform, Load
15. What is a confidence interval? → A range of values likely to contain the true population parameter
16. What does a scatter plot primarily show? → Relationship between two numeric variables
17. What does R-squared (R²) measure in regression analysis? → The proportion of variance in the dependent variable explained by the model
18. Which normal form eliminates transitive dependencies? → 3NF
19. What are the five dimensions commonly used to measure data quality? → Accuracy, Completeness, Consistency, Timeliness, Uniqueness
20. Which type of database is best suited for storing unstructured or semi-structured data? → NoSQL
21. What is a snowflake schema in data warehousing? → A variation of the star schema where dimension tables are normalized into sub-dimensions
22. What is a data breach in the context of compliance? → An unauthorized access or exposure of protected, sensitive, or confidential data
23. What is multicollinearity in regression analysis? → High correlation among independent predictor variables
24. What is a foreign key in a relational database? → A column that references the primary key of another table
25. What is data lineage? → The origin, movement, transformation, and destination of data throughout its lifecycle
26. What does an ROC curve illustrate in model evaluation? → The tradeoff between true positive rate and false positive rate at various thresholds
27. What is Snowflake's multi-cluster, shared data architecture? → Separate storage and compute layers allowing multiple independent query engines
28. What is the purpose of a choropleth map? → Using color intensity to represent data values across geographic regions
29. What SQL statement is used to retrieve data from a database? → SELECT
30. What is Apache Kafka primarily used for? → Real-time data streaming and event-driven pipelines