Advanced System Reporting enables institutions to do robust reporting in order to understand how their system is being used. Administrators can use data from predefined fields in a separate database dedicated to statistics to create and tailor reports to meet their specific needs. These reports assist in understanding and analyzing use of the system and can report information such as when different types of users access the system, how they use the system, and if the system improves student performance.
Data from the Blackboard Learning System is transferred nightly into a separate reporting database. The name of the database is the name of the Virtual Installation appended with stats. The base Virtual Installation that appears in all implementations of the Blackboard Learning System, bb_bb60, has the stats database bb_bb60_stats to handle Advanced System Reporting.
Administrators can schedule the data transfer so that it occurs at a low-traffic time of the night and is properly coordinated with Snapshot loading or other integration processes. Administrators have open access to this database so that they can use the Crystal Reports® templates that Blackboard provides through the Advanced System Reporting: Sample Templates page or develop reports to suit their institution’s needs.
The data that is transferred to the statistics database is a sub-set of the data that is located on the production database. It has a different schema from the data on the production database.
Administrators have open access to the statistics database to use for analysis and creating reports.
Advanced System Reporting is set up automatically when the Blackboard Learning System is installed.
The Enable Event Tracking option must be set to Yes on the Auto-Reporting Options page before Statistics will be recorded.
Every 30 days an automatic process runs that synchronizes the data in the stats database with the data in the main database and then deletes the statistical data from the main database that is more than 30 days old. This process can be run at any time using the PurgeAccumulator tool. The PurgeAccumulator tool can also be used to delete data from the statistics database.
The PurgeAccumulator tool is installed as part of Blackboard Learning System. It is run from the $blackboard/tools/admin directory.
Syntax:
PurgeAccumulator <command> <Virtual_Installation> <days_or_date>
|
Argument |
Description |
|
<command> |
1. purge-live –Takes data from Blackboard database and syncs with tables in the statistics database. After synching, it purges statistical data in the main database that is older than the number of days or date set.
2. purge-stats – goes to stats DB and purges all data older than the last x days or older than a specific date.
|
|
<Virtual_Installation> |
Enter the name of the main database (bbuid) of the Virtual Installation to be purged. |
|
<days_or_date> |
The number of days (from the current date) that should not be processed by the PurgeAccumulator tool. It is also possible to set a date in yyyy-mm-dd format. Only data older than the date will be purged. |
The diagram below shows the relationships between the tables in the Advanced System Reporting database.