1. Care and Feeding of a Data Warehouse
Mary Louise Powers
Lehigh University

2. SCT Banner® Technical Environment
All SCT Banner modules installed
All ‘Web for’ products installed
AIX/Unix, Oracle 8i
Maintained by Enterprise Systems (ESI)

3. Project Background
Request for a data warehouse from Institutional Research (IR)
Strategic decision support
Trend analysis
Efficiency and accuracy
Single institutional data source

4. Project Background Warehouse definition Time slice, Pre-defined events
Strategic, not transactional
Not a Data Mart for operational reporting
Direct / indirect customers
Data, not reports

5. Project Scope Design and implementation from Spring 2001 to Fall 2002
Graduation back to 1992
Enrollment/Registration from Fall 2001
Primary reporting source for IR

6. Design Focused on enrolled students, courses, graduation
Reporting needs
Business processes
Technical interest in Dimensional Model and Star Schema

7. Star Schema

8. Design High level technical design
Translated internal processes into schema
Allowed for implementation of flat tables
Stop gap measure
Supporting data from Admissions & Financial Aid

10. Software Requirements
Extraction, translations, cleansing
Loading and warehouse table builds
Creation of summary tables and views
SCT Banner Executive-Self Service (WFE)
Data Warehouse
Executive Briefing Center
Administrative interface

11. Production Environment
Three databases
SCT Banner Production
“Stage” (copy of SCT Banner Production)
Built from Banner export
Provides “snapshot” of Banner at critical point in time – data is frozen
Limited access
Data Warehouse

12. Production Operations
Enrollment / Registration / Graduation extracts
Enrollment/Registration Events:
10th day census
Midterm census
Last day of class
Close of term

13. Production Operations
Pre-export audit reporting – SCT Banner production
Export of SCT Banner production database
Create Stage database from export (can be refreshed at any point in time)

14. Production Operations
Pre-extract audit reporting – Stage
Clean up of Stage database
Synchronize of Stage and Banner corrections
Archive corrected copy of Stage
Audit trail
Run warehouse maintenance process

15. Customizations / Enhancements
Challenges
Data quality
Time involvement
Getting accurate specifications
Post Refresh Process

16. Administering / Managing Production Operations
Manage events processing
SCT Luminis 3 Portal – Calendar and task list
Operations
Who runs the warehouse
Support and troubleshooting
Security
Request Tracking System

17. Technical Infrastructure maintenance Source code housekeeping
Archiving processes
WFE upgrade
Oracle upgrades
Optimize Stage database creation

18. Documentation Metadata Preliminary stage Quest Software - Toad ®
Common Lehigh definitions

19. Documentation

20. Work in Progress You are never done Data retention requirements - TBD
Data integrity issues
Potential for implementation of other areas
Changing business perspectives (New VP’s, etc)

21. Conclusion On going challenges Benefits Complexity of the system
Timing and synchronization
Lehigh’s data quality requirements
Benefits
Primary data source for IR
Ease of use for historical reporting
Stability of data

22. References
Adamson, C. & Venerable, M. (1998) Data Warehouse Design Solutions. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Dodge, G. & Gorman, T. (1998) Oracle8 Data Warehousing, A Hands on Guide to Designing, Building, and Managing Oracle Data Warehouses. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Kimball, R. (1996) The Data Warehouse Toolkit. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

23. Questions?