Data Warehouse Architecture
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- Housed on a 4-Way 332 MHz 604e Processors server running AIX 4.3.3.
- Data is housed in Oracle databases
- We are also running Oracle Replication to create the ODSs
- Production scripts are written on shell and execute sql and perl programs
- IUIE is the main tool for institutional reporting against data in the Data Warehouse
- Reporting Tools can be any desktop tool of choice that has the ability to connect
to an Oracle server. MS/Access, Focus for Windows, SQR and focus for unix are
currently being used by our customers.
- Future plans are to identify a Business Intelligence tool that we can deploy as the
centrally maintained front-end to the DSS environment.
- Future plans also include the identification of an Extraction Transformation and
Load (ETL) tool that will be able to support the increasing demands in
the Data Warehouse environment
- Unix level access requires safeword authentication.
- Access to the database is controlled via Oracle roles. All the requests for user
access to the DSS environment go through Data Manager approval
- Copies of Operational tables (called base tables) are not available to DSS customers.
These tables are only available to Data Managers who have detailed knowledge of the data
and have a need to see operational data.
- Data is extracted from the base tables and stored in tables that have been modeled
for easy reporting and analysis access. These tables are known as datagroups and are
typically denormalized, summarized and subset. These datagroup tables are typically
available to non-data-manager access.
- Source data for Decision Support purposes comes from several Operational platforms:
- IUIS (Information Center)
- PeopleSoft
- Sirsi (the library client/server platform)
- and Others.
- Currently we get the operational data via the following mechanisms
- Focus extracts followed by ftp’s from IUIS to the DSS platform
- Oracle Replication replicates data from the OLTP environments into ODSs
- For a pictorial representation of this data flow, please refer to
the Decision
Support Environment Diagram.
