• Announcements - Important current information
  
• Access - Information about becoming a new warehouse user
  
• Installation - Install the data warehouse software and student data model
  
• User Notes - Tips, how-to's, frequently asked questions, help
  
• Data Dictionary - Description of objects and attributes
  
• Mailing List - Information about the warehouse mailing list
  
• Contact - Who to contact regarding the Student Data Warehouse

The philosophy of the Student Data Warehouse is to provide the University of Oregon community with an accessible means of composing ad-hoc queries against production student data. Goals also include reducing the load on the production database and giving users access to analytic data not included in the production system.

This is accomplished by creating a new database separate from the University's production database which draws from and in some cases pre-processes production data. The Student Data Warehouse contains a subset of the student information which is stored in the University's BANNER Student Information System. The thousands of BANNER tables have been condensed into a small set of objects, or groups of attributes.

The objects are logical groupings of Banner data from many tables. The objects cover broad categories of student data: personal information, degree information, academic history, enrollment, registration, etc.

These objects provide a useful view into the U of O student data. Users can more easily examine the data, and craft their own ad-hoc queries. The warehouse is not a production database. It is a query-only database for users. The data is refreshed nightly and remains static during the day. This gives users consistency while constructing analytic queries.

A graphical query tool, Bi/Query is distributed as part of the Data Warehouse. Bi/Query enables users to perform sophisticated queries on the Warehouse, and format the results as reports, crosstab reports, mailing labels, or ASCII text to be exported to other applications. Users do not have to understand a complex table structure or Structured Query Language (SQL) to be able to use the warehouse.