Or… some of the issues we faced and the practical decisions we made when developing our reporting database.  This will be a little bit of a technical deep-dive but will cover plenty of information of value to anyone concerned with supporting advancement analytics and information delivery via reports and dashboards.

We have developed a relatively large and comprehensive database designed specifically to support ad hoc analysis, reports, and dashboards.  It has been implemented at a relatively small college (about 75K records) and at a large university (over 800K records).  Their needs are similar, but clearly the physical challenges are different.

In this session we will describe how we addressed a number of important design issues including:

– Choice of technologies (primarily SQL Server based)
– The performance, design, and ongoing maintenance of the ETL
– Underlying principles for the reporting data structures
– Costs