Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Services

The Mason Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) team delivers enterprise-wide data services by delivering trusted, unified and well-governed data that supports operational and analytical reporting and dashboards for various departments across the University. The EDW serves as a centralized system of record, enabling informed decision-making through consistent and reliable data.

The EDW team is responsible for the design, development, correlation/unification, and ongoing maintenance of data within the data warehouse environment. 


EDW Capabilities:

The Mason EDW is composed of multiple subject area focused data marts that extract and transform data from different institutional source systems. These data marts are designed to provide a single, authoritative source of truth for both historical and current business data.

The data is extracted from multiple sources or different modules within the same system – integrated, transformed and made available for reporting and analysis. End users access EDW data through a self-service business intelligence platform that supports intuitive, drag-and-drop report creation.

For academic subject areas, the EDW captures daily point-in-time snapshots using effective dating. This approach preserves historical records and enables year-over-year trending and analysis. Such historical visibility is typically unavailable in source systems, and it is difficult to implement directly within the reporting tools.

EDW Subject Areas:

Administrative Data Marts:

  • Finance
  • Human Resources
  • Sponsored Programs
  • Accounts Payable and Purchasing

Academic Data Marts:

  • Student
  • Admissions
  • Student Accounts
  • Events

Access to EDW Data:

Direct access to the EDW databases is not permitted. All data access is provided through the University’s Business Intelligence reporting tool, MicroStrategy. This ensures consistent data usage, security, and governance while enabling self-service reporting for authorized users.

Data Refresh and Availability:

All EDW data marts are refreshed through automated Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) batch processes.

Refresh Schedule:

  • All data marts: refreshed nightly
  • Finance data mart (FDM): refreshed twice daily (at noon and after midnight)

This automated refresh process ensures that users have timely access to up-to-date and reliable data for reporting and analysis.