Introduction

Welcome!

The Data Warehouse underlies Civitas Learning's Student Impact Platform. Here you may browse its data dictionary.

important

For access to a sample database, please reach out to your account manager for a login.

Tools

We use Amazon RedShift for our data warehouse. It's fast, cloud-based, and uses very standard SQL.

You can log into it with a wide array of tools, but we tend to use Data Grip.

You can learn more about RedShift.

Security

Securing your data is critical, so there are several levels of security to keep your data private:

  • You receive a private login.
  • You provide us a range of IP addresses so we can set up an allow-list.
  • We partition your organization into a separate database.
  • If there are multiple logical institutions in your data set, you can only see your data, just as other Civitas customers can only see theirs.

Data Model

We use a star schema model, which surrounds a fact (data) table with its dimension (descriptive) tables:

  • Central fact tables contain the quantitiative and event information.
  • Radiating dim tables contain lookup and reference information.

Dimensions and Lifespans

important

All of these dimension tables are modeled as slowly changing dimensions (SCDs), because the changes come irregularly and infrequently. Because of this, dates need correct handling.

Each dim table has raw_eff_ts and raw_eff_ts_end. These are timestamps that indicate the lifespan of that record.

When you use a dim to get the current value, add this predicate snippet:

AND GETDATE() BETWEEN raw_eff_ts and raw_eff_ts_end

Replace GETDATE() with other date columns to get the lookup values 'as of' prior times.

Column Names: raw and civ

Columns that start with raw come from your source system. These contain values familiar to you if you have been querying your own SIS or LMS.

Columns that start with civ are our normalized values that are mapped consistently across all systems and customers. These are the columns on which we build our products and models.

Operations

We rebuild the Data Warehouse daily, so your data is fresh.

Edit this page