SIS Reporting
Class Enrollment Datamart
Introduction
The Class Enrollment Datamart provides a new way to look at SIS class enrollment information. It was
created mainly to help schools answer questions about which schools the students in their classes come
from. This is not new data; it is all information that is already available to you in the SIS Reporting
Database. However, the data has been put together in a different way to make it easier to build reports
to get quick answers.
The datamart is built in a star schema (see additional details section). This is a bit different from what
SIS reporting users are accustomed to, but star schemas have some advantages (and of course, some
disadvantages).
Advantages:
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Speed! The datamart is much faster than our traditional reporting views. Class enrollments are
normally one of the slower things to report on in the Reporting Database because of the large
volume of data. However, the reports we’ve built using the datamart run in only a few seconds. In
fact, if you create a report from the datamart that runs for more than a minute, we urge you to
contact RPTSupport@virginia.edu. Once we look at the details of your report, we can likely suggest
ways to make it faster.
There are fewer tables to sort through to find what you are looking for. The Student Records
business area has 50 folders. The Class Enrollment Datamart has 5. In addition, the five folders
have fewer columns—just the most commonly used items.
You don’t have to worry about joins. With Student Records folders you are sometimes asked which
join you want to use between folders. Joins are difficult to understand, yet if you make the wrong
choice, you might get the wrong data back. The folders in the datamart are joined in one way only,
so you will never be asked about joins. There is no need to understand the difference between
standard and outer joins.
Sums from the fact table are automatically recalculated when you change the columns in your query
(more on the fact table later.)
Disadvantages:
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The datamart contains only a subset of the data available. It is good at answering the questions it
was designed for, but may not answer all your questions.
Due to the way Discoverer works, if you are creating a new report you have to select from the Fact
Table folder before all the other folders become available. (More on this later.)
Datamarts are easy to use, but fairly complex to create—which is why we only have one (so far).
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Class Enrollment Datamart – Additional Details
In order to work with the datamart you must understand the way it functions:
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The Class Enrollment Datamart does not include all terms available in SIS. At this time we have
included data for Summer 2009 (1096) forward.
The datamart includes only Enrolled records. Records with a Student_Enrollment_Status of
Dropped or Waiting are not included. Withdrawals are included.
The Class Enrollment Datamart has its own Business Area within Discoverer:
However, the relationship between the folders is not clear as displayed in Discoverer. The folders
are joined like this:
This diagram makes it clearer where the term star schema comes from. A star schema consists of
one fact table, and several dimensions (tables of attributes).
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See the SIS Data Catalog for full details about the folders and items available in the datamart. As
additional fields are added, the catalog will be updated. We will not attempt to duplicate all that
information in this document. Follow this link: Class Enrollment Datamart. In addition, the catalog
also contains a new section of information about all the SS-owned workbooks in Discoverer.
Class Enrollment Datamart Folders
The following are the folders used and a description of use.
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The Class Enrollments folder contains the measures, or numeric amounts, that can be reported on.
It has one record for each class section that a student has enrolled in. Additional measures indicate
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the school the student comes from. Remember that students may enroll in multiple components of
the same course—Lecture, Laboratory, Discussion, etc. If you don’t wish to see all components
counted, be sure to limit your query using one of the component-related items in the Classes folder.
Use the Terms folder to select the date range of data you wish to report on. Selections can be made
by Term, Academic_Year, and Calendar_Year, for example.
The Students folder contains demographic data about students: name, ID numbers, addresses,
phone numbers, etc. It contains essentially the same information as in the SR_Students folder used
throughout the Reporting Database.
The Classes folder contains Schedule of Classes information about each class section. Cancelled
classes are not included.
Student Terms contains term information about the students, and information about the program
and plan(s) in which the student was activated for the term. As such, the folder does not contain all
programs and plans in which a student is enrolled. A dual degree student for example may be Active
in Program in two programs and plans, but they will only be activated in one per term; that’s the
one included in the Student Terms folder. Likewise, a student’s program and plan may change
during a term; the folder contains the latest program and plan information effective during the
term.
Special Considerations When Creating a Worksheet using the Datamart
1. To create a new Discoverer worksheet using the Datamart, select the Class Enrollment
Datamart business area (the list of Business Areas you see in Discoverer depends on your
security).
Remember that when creating a new Discoverer worksheet, once you select a column to be
in your query, all the other folders gray out except for those that are joined with the folder you are
working with. As shown in the diagram above, the folders in the datamart are joined with the fact
table only. Therefore if you start your query in a logical place, such as selecting the term of data
you want to look at, you’ll find all the other datamart tables except the fact table are then grayed
out:
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2. To make the other folders available to you again, select next from Class Enrollments (Fact
Table):
If a student has more than one plan or sub-plan for the active program in a term, the plans
are combined in one field. This is done to prevent duplicate rows and incorrect amounts being
created in reports because of a student having more than one plan. This means, however, if you
want to limit your query to a certain plan, you must be careful how you do it.
For example, if you want to search for the English (BA) plan, the following condition will return
incomplete data:
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The problem with this condition is that it returns only the rows where a student has only one plan
and not English (BA) combined with another plan.
The list of values for Academic_Plans and Academic_Plans_Desc includes all the existing
combinations in the datamart. So when entering the value for your condition, choose Select
Multiple Values.
This brings up the same dialog box that you often get when you click the
parameter. Then search for all values that contain English (BA), and use the
the combinations:
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button next to a
button to select all
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Particular data elements only appear in one of the folders of the star. For example, the
Primary_Name of the student can only be obtained from the Students dimension. Likewise, if you
wish to know the term in which a particular class was held, you will have to include it from the
Terms folder.
This may seem inconvenient at first, but it reduces the clutter of repeated elements, and makes it
easier to find what you are looking for, as well as improving the speed of the datamart.
Using the SR_Sources of Enrollment Workbook
At this point, the SIS team has built only one workbook using the datamart. SR_Sources of Enrollment
provides a good example of how the datamart can be used. It works like any other Discoverer
workbook, but has a drill down feature you may not have seen before.
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By Academic Group: the first tab of the workbook returns a summary of enrollments at the
University for an entire academic year, broken down by school and term:
The report allows you to see the schools of enrollment for the students in the classes.
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By Class: the second tab lists the same information by class. The tab can be run like any other
Discoverer report, or you can drill down to it from the By Academic Group tab using the
button on any of the data rows in the Term column:
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Click on By Class, and the second tab of the workbook automatically runs and returns the data
for the school and term you selected.
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Student Details: from By Class tab you can drill down further to the Student Details tab from a
subject, catalog number, or specific class section. The Student Details tab returns the names,
schools, and plans of the enrolled students:
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Detailed information on this report can also be viewed in the Data Catalog by clicking this link:
SR_Sources of Enrollment.
We hope you find the datamart useful and easy to use. It is a work in progress: we are already at work
adding more data elements. If you find additional information you would like to see included in the
datamart, or have other related questions, please write RPTSupport@virginia.edu. In addition you can
bring your questions to one of our weekly Question and Answer sessions; for a complete schedule, click
here.
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