Weber State University’s Ogden, Utah campus is located on the western flank of the Rockies, where more than 26,000 students pursue professional, liberal arts and technical certificates, as well as associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

The challenge

Weber State wanted to build a data warehouse to enhance data consistency and sharing across the university for reporting and analysis. The university considered building its own data warehouse, but it readily became apparent that it wouldn’t be able to complete the project in a timely way with the available resources. Additionally, responding to changing requirements and policies, and other demands for IT’s time, would be challenging.

In seeking a solution, Weber State investigated packaged, cloud-based tools, but found that most universities who had purchased these solutions needed to heavily customize them. Weber State also faced a harsh reality; universities that had successfully built their own data warehouse or heavily customized a packaged solution had six or seven times more personnel than Weber State had available for the effort.

The solution

While researching potential solutions, Weber State discovered WhereScape® RED. Besides its capabilities to fast-track big enterprise data warehousing on many leading packaged platforms, Weber State was particularly impressed by its active use by many small IT teams.

The results

From the time that Weber State selected WhereScape RED, it took the university just nine months to deliver a comprehensive Oracle data warehouse with only two staff members. The initial rollout of the data warehouse contained Weber State student information comprised of 10 fact tables and supporting dimensions detailing one million student registration records dating back to 2006. The new Weber State enterprise data warehouse greatly enhanced data consistency, quality and access for Weber State’s hundreds of Tableau users and enables analysts to ask and answer questions that were not possible using the university’s previous data management infrastructure.