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Data Warehouse

Welcome to the Data Warehouse for Boise State University! From this page you will be able to access an array of reports that provide information on a number of aspects of the university’s activities. We hope to add reports on other areas soon.

What is a data warehouse, and why do we need one? All administrative computing systems, such as the PeopleSoft systems used at Boise State, are optimized for collecting and processing data, not for analysis and reporting. Although extracting and analyzing data directly from such a system is possible, it is difficult and complex. A data warehouse is a system that contains much of the data from the source administrative system, but transformed into an architecture that is optimized for analysis and reporting. Once a data warehouse has been built, various user-friendly reporting and analysis tools can be used to access it.

Data warehouse is based on the HigherEd Analytics Suite from iStrategy Solutions. So far we have implemented the portions of the iStrategy Student module dealing with Enrollment, Majors and Minors, Class Registration and Degrees awarded. We will soon be implementing further features of the Student module, and we hope to implement further modules such as Finance, Human Resources and Financial Aid over the next few years. In technical terms, the iStrategy system includes both a relational dimensional warehouse and an OLAP cube layer.

How Do I Access the Data Warehouse? In this initial phase of our implementation, we are using a reporting tool known as ProClarity to access the OLAP cube layer of the data warehouse. To access these reports, you first need to be granted the appropriate security, which you can request by filling out the FERPA form accessible by the link below and mailing it to Debi Reininger, MS-1136. You will be notified by the Help Desk when your access has been granted. Once you have the security, simply click on the ProClarity reports link on this page. IMPORTANT NOTE: You must be using Microsoft Internet Explorer! This will take you to our Library of reports, which is organized into various books. Detailed documentation as to how to use these reports and what the various data elements mean can be found here.

We soon plan to add another way to access the data warehouse, via a separate set of reports created using Microsoft Reporting Services. When those reports are available, you will also be able to access them via a link from this page.