Supporting User Defined Custom Hierarchies in Central Datamarts

Presentation Summary

Neil Belcher and Rayna King, Cornell University

Centrally defined hierarchies often do not meet the special needs of campus units. Units often spend a lot of time and effort downloading central data to local systems so they can add their own hierarchies, groupings and calculations. What if you could provide users with the capability of defining their own custom hierarchies/groupings within the central datamart? Would they still need to download data? This presentation describes one approach that gives individual users just that kind of power. We will discuss the user experience in terms of creating and maintaining custom hierarchies, how to use the hierarchies in reports, as well the behind the scenes data structures used.