Data Warehousing

Data Warehousing Initiative

There are many definitions, none of which are standard, but most agree that a data warehouse is a place where data can be quickly and easily accessed. Furthermore, the term data warehouse usually encompasses a tool set for querying, analyzing, and presenting information. Why do we need a separate place for our data? Why can't we go directly to a system like Spectrum (PeopleSoft) or GoSolar (Banner) to get our answers? After all, this is where the transactions themselves occur, like registration or payment of student fees. An operational system does not lend itself to frequent ad hoc querying without significant performance degradation; it typically only provides data from the specific transaction it records (Spectrum primarily provides financial data; GoSolar provides student data.). Before data is loaded into a data warehouse, it is extracted from operational system(s), cleansed, and quality assured. The data warehouse ensures the availability of consistent, high quality data from a variety of sources (different transactional systems).

The Director of Institutional Research currently provides the leadership for this undertaking at Georgia State University. The UIS Data Warehouse team is responsible for the technical aspects of the transition of the current Student Information System Data Mart, which is currently known as STATWARE, from the legacy system (Oasis) to SCT Banner (GoSolar -- GSU's new student software info system); that team's responsibilities also include the enhancement and expansion of that system (StatWare) to become a "state of the art" data mart for student information; potential future goals under the warehouse initiative include the development of an enterprise wide data warehouse that will ultimately integrate the data from the various operational transactional systems at GSU (like Spectrum, HRMS, Banner, etc) into a data warehouse which will provide timely, actionable information to administrators, staff and faculty.

The information provided by the Student Information Services (SIS) data mart or Statware enables administrative staff and faculty to make appropriate business decisions for the institution and its students; this storehouse of information is sometimes called "business intelligence." By analyzing current and historical data, a decision-maker will be better able to forecast enrollment, classroom utilization, etc.

Building a data warehouse is a process ranging from determining user needs, to building a project plan, design of the warehouse, and, finally, the implementation. It involves the skills of many areas: project management, data modeling, data administration, data architecture, data staging, dimensional design, application developers, web developers, data mining, and many others.

StatWare (GSU's student information datamart) may be reached at:

http://dss.gsu.edu/statware

If you have any questions pertaining to data warehousing or StatWare, please contact dwh in GroupWise.