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Team # 494 -- The Data Warehouse


Information Technology Services (ITS)

February 2002

Objective

The Office of Administrative Systems' Data Warehouse provides the university community with easy, flexible and widely available ad hoc access to institutional data for analytical and reporting purposes. It has become the source for a system of "data marts" or subsets of data oriented to various functional business areas. The warehouse is generally available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to individuals who have been granted access and who have the appropriate software.

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Team Membership

• Peter Dawson, Member
• Yvonne Riley, Member

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Results Achieved to Date

• System provided new capability; reports available during the day from an individual's desk, rather than requiring a programmer and an (at least) overnight wait. Future improvements: adding more data, easier access (possibly via the web). Benefits are to users of data warehouse.
• May 2002: The Data Warehouse provides the University community with easy, flexible and widely available ad hoc access to institutional data for analytical and reporting purposes.
  
  Transactional data is copied on a pre-arranged schedule from the enterprise server to the Warehouse and structured for querying and reporting. These subsets of data are oriented to various functional business areas, i.e., student enrollment, human resources, alumni, etc.
  
  The goal of the Data Warehouse is to make this repository of data more accessible to Penn State faculty and staff in their daily work, thereby "unlocking" its potential use throughout the University.
• Ginger Breon, Smeal College of Business, says:
  "I can't say enough about the benefits of the Data Warehouse for our College. I have used the student data on the Warehouse to provide the deans with information for strategic planning, comparative analysis, and other special reports. It is amazing how much easier it is to retrieve and manipulate the data I need from the system for extensive analysis…"
• Software packages that support Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and the Structured Query Language (SQL) are used to query the tables on the Data Warehouse.

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