South African Presentations

The University of Cape Town’s Student Records Data Mart provides the facility for reporting on student record and progression statistics, performing trend analysis as well as enabling faculty offices processing Student records to make quick decisions about their students.

We went live with the Student Records DW/BI project (June 2013). It was introduced in the context of growing numbers of requests for student records and progression statistical reporting as well at the growing number of operational reports. PeopleSoft, like any other transactional data base systems, is designed for processing information, not reporting.

The presentation will cover an in depth look at the design of the student records dimensional data model (using the Kimball methodology), data profiling as well as the approach to ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process.

The Student Records data mart has eight fact tables, the program plan fact table, term history fact, enrolment fact, transfer credit fact, mid-term results fact, academic standing fact, degree fact and honours and awards fact table together with their respective dimensions.

The following data was included in the student records data mart:
• Bio demo data
• Academic program/ plan data
• Term year data
• Course catalogue data
• Class data
• Degree data

The ETL system was developed using Business Objects data services for historic load processing and incremental load processing.

All reports and dashboards were developed using Business Objects Enterprise.

Five years of student records data was extracted including all effective dated rows in the applicant fact tale so one can do comparative statistical reporting at any stage across years.