Pre-Read Materials
Ed-Fi Analytics Middle Tier Design Proposal (PDF)
Agenda
- Welcome & thanks
- Brief overview of the proposal
- Q&A - clarification of the proposal
- Discussion topics:
- Can you envision using these views in real-world projects?
- Are there other use cases that would be immediately useful, beyond Early Warning System?
- Thoughts on sharing your solutions with the community?
- Are you concerned about data quality with real time analytics?
Attendees
Notes
Q&A
- Are you considering temporal / multi-year in this model? → Not at this time, ODS as it is. Views could be modified to take any customizations into account.
- EWS model is predictive. Would be nice to compare year-over-year → Yes this is a good point. Anyone could easily extract the EWS data into a warehouse to look at the impact of interventions and/or assess the efficacy of the predictive model.
- Are there performance concerns with these views? → In a word, yes. Best practice will be to load the data elsewhere before letting the BI presentation layer access it - not supporting direct query mode from presentation to ODS. Two possible solutions:
- Replicate / log ship / restore from backup to another copy of the ODS
- Many BI tools have their own "data mart" under the hood that can pull data in from source systems, with storage in highly efficient structures (i.e. column store).
- Is there a plan for an API on these views? → Not currently being considered.
- Which version of the Ed-Fi Data Model will this be built on? → initially supporting the 2.x data model. If/when demand is proven out, will work on Data Model v3.x support.
- Can you add last modified date to the dimensions, to support polling for updated records? → Yes
- What do you think about fully flattening the fact and dimension data into a single object? → Some modern platforms are extremely efficient at handling data in this way, but we need to support a broad range of solutions. Keeping with the star/snowflake provides that broader support, while allowing the BI data modeler to either transform into a flattened table or use calculated columns to give the appearance of a flat table within the analytics engine.
- What about multi-tenant support for educational service centers that have multiple districts? → We should be able to support this. Stephen will talk to Sherod Keen to talk about additions to the dimensional data model.
- Does the security model support the concept of district staff (e.g. Assistant Superintendent) overseeing multiple schools? → Yes, this is feasible.
- Assuming that you have an "Assistant Superintendent" classification descriptor, map that to the "School" scope instead of "District" scope in the
StaffClassificationAuthorizationScope
table. - So long as your SIS loads the API's
staffSchoolAssociation
properly for these individuals, theUserAuthorization
view will have one row per school for each Assistant Superintendent, while continuing to have a single row withSchoolPermission = "All"
for the Superintendent.
- Assuming that you have an "Assistant Superintendent" classification descriptor, map that to the "School" scope instead of "District" scope in the