DAA-C01 Question 21
Select 2The elements that are required for business goals (using BI reports or SQL analysis)A retail company wants to reduce monthly executive reporting delays. Today, analysts manually export data into spreadsheets, and different teams use different SQL logic to calculate revenue, returns, and gross margin. Leadership wants a BI dashboard in Snowflake that is trusted across Finance, Sales, and Operations. Before building the dashboard or writing the final SQL, which TWO elements are most critical to define first so the solution aligns with the business goal?
- A
A shared definition of business KPIs and calculation logic, including metric grain and filters
- B
The warehouse size that will be used by BI users during peak dashboard refresh periods
- C
The target audience, decision-making use case, and reporting cadence for the dashboard
- D
A requirement that every report be built only with raw source tables instead of curated semantic layers
- E
The color palette, chart style, and branding standards for the BI tool
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C
Explanation
To support business goals with BI reports or SQL analysis, the first priority is requirements definition, not technical tuning or cosmetic design. Two especially important elements are: (1) clear, shared KPI definitions and calculation rules, and (2) a precise understanding of the audience and decision-making use case. In practice, Snowflake data analysts often translate business goals into governed metrics, curated data models, and reporting logic that can be reused across BI tools. This reduces conflicting numbers across teams and improves trust. Snowflake best practices emphasize separating raw ingestion from curated, consumable layers and using standardized SQL logic, views, or modeled datasets for analytics consumption. Performance choices such as warehouse sizing are important later, but they do not replace business requirement clarity. Likewise, report formatting is secondary to ensuring the dashboard answers the right questions with consistent definitions.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Defining common KPI logic is foundational to meeting a business goal with BI reports or SQL analysis. If teams calculate revenue, returns, or gross margin differently, the dashboard will not be trusted regardless of performance or visual design. Candidates should recognize that agreed metric definitions, dimensional grain, time windows, exclusions, and filter behavior are essential before implementation.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Warehouse sizing matters for performance and cost management in Snowflake, but it does not establish whether the report answers the right business question. It should be considered during solution design, not as one of the first required elements for aligning analytics with the business goal.
- C. Correct.
Correct. Understanding who will use the dashboard, what decisions they need to make, and how often they need the data is a core business-requirement activity. This determines the level of detail, freshness, dimensions, and delivery format needed. Without this context, even technically correct SQL may fail to support the intended business outcome.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Requiring reports to use only raw source tables is not a best practice and can undermine consistency. In Snowflake-based analytics, curated models, secure views, semantic layers, or governed reporting tables are often used specifically to standardize business logic and improve trust in reporting.
- E. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Visualization standards can improve adoption and usability, but they are not among the most critical initial elements required to ensure the analytics solution supports the business goal. A visually polished dashboard with undefined metrics or unclear audience needs will still fail.