Data Management and Reporting
What this domain covers
You must understand how data is stored, protected, and turned into reports. Know the basics of relational databases: tables, records, fields, primary keys, foreign keys, and relationships. Understand what a query does and the role of SQL as a language for retrieving and summarising data. Be familiar with spreadsheets as a data tool: sorting, filtering, pivot tables, lookup functions, and data validation.
Concepts to master
Reporting concepts include static vs interactive dashboards, operational vs strategic reports, and the value of a single source of truth. Know data governance basics: access control, backup, version control, retention, and anonymisation or pseudonymisation of personal data. Understand why consistent naming, documentation, and a data dictionary matter, and what ETL (extract, transform, load) means at a high level.
Traps in questions
- Confusing a primary key (unique identifier in its own table) with a foreign key (a reference to another table's key).
- Assuming a pivot table changes the underlying data: it summarises a copy.
- Treating a dashboard as automatically accurate when its refresh failed or its filters are misapplied.
- Forgetting that deleting source rows can break reports that depend on them.
- Overlooking that anonymised data cannot be re-identified, whereas pseudonymised data can.
Worked rule of thumb
Before trusting any report, verify four things: source (where the data came from), refresh (when it last updated), filters (what is excluded), and definitions (how each measure is calculated). A report that cannot answer all four is a draft, not a decision tool.