Practical design and architectural issues to address when creating an advancement data mart
Channel: The DRIVE/conference
Date: 19/03/2014

Or... some of the issues we faced and the practical decisions we made when developing our reporting database.  This will be a little bit of a technical deep-dive but will cover plenty of information of value to anyone concerned with supporting advancement analytics and information delivery via reports and dashboards.

We have developed a relatively large and comprehensive database designed specifically to support ad hoc analysis, reports, and dashboards.  It has been implemented at a relatively small college (about 75K records) and at a large university (over 800K records).  Their needs are similar, but clearly the physical challenges are different.

In this session we will describe how we addressed a number of important design issues including:

- Choice of technologies (primarily SQL Server based)
- The performance, design, and ongoing maintenance of the ETL
- Underlying principles for the reporting data structures
- Costs

Michiel Westerkamp, President of Cassius Information Systems, works with colleges and universities to develop innovative reporting and business intelligence applications that satisfy the strategic and operational information needs of advancement management and front-line staff. Michiel developed his first advancement CRM and records management system when he joined Business Systems Resources in 1983. That system and its successor versions have been used to support over $100 billion in capital campaigns. Michiel served as a BSR partner and VP until the 1999 sale of the company to SunGard Data Systems, for eight years as president of SunGard BSR, and for 2 plus years as a member of the SunGard Higher Education executive team.