Financial aid data warehouse (Master of Software Engineering)

Abstract

Recently, the institutional research office has increasingly emphasized campus decision applications in which current and historical data is comprehesively analyzed and explored in order to support high-level decision making. Many characteristics of decision support queries make the current database system inadequate: The query clause required by institutional research office often contains many AND and OR conditions. Particularly OR conditions are poorly handled in the current school database systems. The institutional research office often needs to pose several related queries. Since there is no convenient way to express these commonly occuring families of queries, ITS has to write them as a collection of independent queries, which can be tedious. Further, the DBMS has no way to recognize and exploit optimization opportunities arising from excuting many related queries together. Because many of the analyses performed are recurrent and predictable. Data warehouse provides access to data for complex analysis, knowledge discovery and decision making. This report describes the development of financial aid data warehouse, especially the activities performed in each stages, data warehouse design and data dictionary, the challenges encountered, issues, current status of the project, limitation and possible improvement.