You work at a high school as a teacher delivering courses for building computer

Question

You work at a high school as a teacher delivering courses for building computer skills. In addition, you help to support the computing needs of the high school working with the one IT person who recently accepted a job at a different school. The high school is in the process of hiring a new IT person. The timing could not have been worse as the high school is involved in a big project to improve their information systems and technology.

You were asked to join a discussion between the high school administration and information system vendors on the information and technology needs at the high school based upon your background, education, and experience. In preparation for the upcoming meeting, you received an e-mail from the principal with questions about the project:

Why should we have separate databases and a data warehouse?

Why don't we just have one large database for all our data, both current and historical?

How would we use a data warehouse, and how would it help this high school?

Are there other information systems we should consider?

How would a mobile wireless network impact the educational process here?

Explanation / Answer

Why should we have separate databases and a data warehouse?

We should have database to store and manage information related to day-to-day operations.

Eg. Managing the fees of the students ,

       The salary of the teachers,etc.

We should have data warehouse to help the managerial community in its decision making process.

Eg . If the school plans to expand geographically , we could opt for places from which a large volume of students have attended school and it is considerably distant from the current location.

Why don't we just have one large database for all our data, both current and historical?

There is a certain time limit upto which data is useful as for running day to day operations. Therefore,as soon as the time limit expires we should move the data to the data warehouse and keep only the data that is valuable at that instance of time in the data warehouse.

Also if there had been only one place to store the data,the process of retrieval of data would become really slow.Also queries would come up with results that are not valid anymore.

Eg. If we query the database to find out how many people opted for science , it will return the tuples of the students who have graduated the school as well. Unless ofcourse constraints are applied.

But we wouldnt need to apply constraints incase our database consisted of only valid data and history data was stored separately in a data warehoouse.

How would we use a data warehouse, and how would it help this high school?

Eg. If we want to analyse the trend in which students are bunking classes , we would look towards history data in search of patterns. Maybe its a particular teacher the students dont like , or a particular subject.

Like stated in the above example , it would be really helpful for the students if the right teacher is teaching the right subject so that the bunk rate goes down.

Are there other information systems we should consider?

I suppose not , because data warehousing and mining is used by big organisations for goals such as scalability , imporoving market share etc and it is proving really helpful.

This would be sufficient for the school to become better.

How would a mobile wireless network impact the educational process here?

Students could now submit/recieve assignments in the classroom itself. Also because we're talking wireless they could just use their laptops to connect to the network from anywhere on the campus , whereas earlier they used computer labs which could never meet the demands in a case where too many students need to take help from the internet at the same time. Going wireless would reduce the chaos in the computer labs.

Wireless network is easier to setup as compared to a wired one . We just need to deploy a number of routers on the campus. Whereas earlier it was a cumbersome task to connect desktops to LAN via ethernet cables.

Each student/teacher can be given their unique credentials which can also help in tracking history and ensuring that the internet facility is being used wisely.

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