IT at the College: College Information Services

Data Warehousing at the College of Charleston

The College of Charleston currently does not have a data warehouse. It is the charge of the Office of College Information Services to develop the architecture and deployment of a data warehouse as part of the College's ERP implementation to begin in late summer 2008.

What is a Data Warehouse?

According to Stanford University, "A Data Warehouse is a repository of integrated information, available for queries and analysis. Data and information are extracted from heterogeneous sources as they are generated....This makes it much easier and more efficient to run queries over data that originally came from different sources."

The College's current administrative systems live in a Transaction (or Operational) Database. Transaction databases are defined to contain current value data, are very volatile, and are process and function oriented (registering a student, assigning faculty to a course, posting financial transactions, etc.) Typical operational databases are designed for on-line transactional processing (OLTP) and do not meet the requirements for effective on-line analytical processing (OLAP).

A Data Warehouse is an integrated set of time-variant data that are non-volatile. It is a stand alone system, so that querying and reporting from it will have minimal impact on the transaction processing system.