Penn State's Data Warehouse In early 1994 Penn State embarked on a data warehouse project to make ad hoc access to institutional data easier, more flexible and more widely available to the university community for analytical and reporting purposes. The original aim of the effort was to unlock the data from the mainframe environment and make it accessible from the desktop. The data warehouse now has become the source for a system of "data marts" or subsets of data oriented to various functional business areas. There are more than a dozen active databases, including approximately 100 tables, comprising just under 100 million records. All of the data, transferred from the Administrative Information Services legacy computer on a regular schedule, is non-modifiable and represents a snapshot of time-fixed data. This consistent source of data allows for ad hoc inquiries as well as longitudinal analyses. The warehouse is generally available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to individuals who have been granted access and who have the appropriate software.

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