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CISA—Certified Information Systems Auditor - Part 247

Mary Smith

Fri, 17 Apr 2026

CISA—Certified Information Systems Auditor - Part 247

1. When performing a database review, an IS auditor notices that some tables in the database are not normalized. The IS auditor should next:

A) recommend that the database be normalized.
B) review the conceptual data model.
C) review the stored procedures.
D) review the justification.



2. A database administrator has detected a performance problem with some tables which could be solved through denormalization. This situation will increase the risk of:

A) concurrent access.
B) deadlocks.
C) unauthorized access to data.
D) a loss of data integrity.



3. An IS auditor finds that client requests were processed multiple times when received from different independent departmental databases, which are synchronized weekly. What would be the BEST recommendation?

A) increase the frequency for data replication between the different department systems to ensure timely updates.
B) Centralize all request processing in one department to avoid parallel processing of the same request.
C) Change the application architecture so that common data is held in just one shared database for all departments.
D) implement reconciliation controls to detect duplicates before orders are processed in the systems.



4. Which of the following database controls would ensure that the integrity of transactions is maintained in an online transaction processing system's database?

A) Authentication controls
B) Data normalization controls
C) Read/write access log controls
D) Commitment and rollback controls



5. An IS auditor finds that, at certain times of the day, the data warehouse query performance decreases significantly. Which of the following controls would it be relevant for the IS auditor to review?

A) Permanent table-space allocation
B) Commitment and rollback controls
C) User spool and database limit controls
D) Read/write access log controls



1. Right Answer: D
Explanation: If the database is not normalized, the IS auditor should review the justification since, in some situations, denormalization is recommended for performance reasons. The IS auditor should not recommend normalizing the database until further investigation takes place. Reviewing the conceptual data model or the stored procedures will not provide information about normalization.

2. Right Answer: D
Explanation: Normalization is the removal of redundant data elements from the database structure. Disabling normalization in relational databases will create redundancy and a risk of not maintaining consistency of data, with the consequent loss of data integrity. Deadlocks are not caused by denormalization. Access to data is controlled by defining user rights to information, and is not affected by denormalization.

3. Right Answer: C
Explanation: Keeping the data in one place is the best way to ensure that data are stored without redundancy and that all users have the same data on their systems. Although increasing the frequency may help to minimize the problem, the risk of duplication cannot be eliminated completely because parallel data entry is still possible.Business requirements will most likely dictate where data processing activities are performed. Changing the business structure to solve an IT problem is not practical or politically feasible. Detective controls do not solve the problem of duplicate processing, and would require that an additional process be implemented to handle the discovered duplicates.

4. Right Answer: D
Explanation: Commitment and rollback controls are directly relevant to integrity. These controls ensure that database operations that form a logical transaction unit will complete in its entirety or not at all; i.e., if, for some reason, a transaction cannot be fully completed, then incomplete inserts/updates/deletes are rolled back so that the database returns to its pretransaction state. All other choices would not address transaction integrity.

5. Right Answer: C
Explanation: User spool limits restrict the space available for running user queries. This prevents poorly formed queries from consuming excessive system resources and impacting general query performance. Limiting the space available to users in their own databases prevents them from building excessively large tables. This helps to control space utilization which itself acts to help performance by maintaining a buffer between the actual data volume stored and the physical device capacity. Additionally, it prevents users from consuming excessive resources in ad hoc table builds (as opposed to scheduled production loads that often can run overnight and are optimized for performance purposes), in a data warehouse, since you are not running online transactions, commitment and rollback does not have an impact on performance. The other choices are not as likely to be the root cause of this performance issue.

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