About the Warehouse

Implemented in 1995 after an indepth pilot study, the University's Data Warehouse makes Penn's institutional data available to decision makers for query, analysis, and reporting. The Warehouse stores selected data from Penn's business systems, such as SRS (Students Record System) and BEN Financials. The data is filtered, made consistent, and aggregated in various ways. Use of the Warehouse is restricted to authorized individuals of the Penn community. Access to the Warehouse does not require formal programming skills; desktop tools such as Business Objects support analysis and reporting.

The Warehouse contains student and course data, sponsored project data, salary management data, general ledger data, property management asset data, space data and insitutional advancement data.

While the Warehouse is organized by subject areas, into "data collections", tables from various collections are often joined together to provide integrated information about the University.

Technical Information
The University's Data Warehouse is an Oracle 10.2.0.4 (10g) relational database management system (RDBMS). The database resides on a four processor IBM p630 Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) server with 8 GB of memory and over 500 GB disk space, running under AIX 5.3

More information about the University's Data Warehouse is available in the following documents:
How the Warehouse Works
What the Warehouse Contains