DASL: Insight into Database Conversion

By

Kevin Groff

Stephen Raney

Watchirawan Santayodom

Melissa Sepos

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Businesses throughout the world have to constantly evaluate when it is necessary to

integrate or improve software into their business solutions so they can stay ahead or abreast of

technological advancements within their industry. The education industry is no different when it

comes to making these decisions. Recently, ITCs’ and school districts in the state of Ohio had to

make the decision on whether they would be updating their SMRS to e-SIS or DASL.1,2,3 Five

ITCs’ and two public school districts within Ohio went with e-SIS, but sixteen ITCs’ made the

decision to go with DASL. On the whole it was found DASL was more technologically

advanced piece of software over e-SIS, we will be exploring reasons behind the ITC

administrators’ decision to select and implement DASL over e-SIS, the advantages and

disadvantages of DASL, conversion issues encountered, and training.

The Business Decisions

Like corporate executives, educational administrators needed to conduct several business

analyses in order to make an effective decision on which software would be selected for their

ITC or school district. Many of the inputs into the decision-making process required to make a

case to support replacing the existing processes and software or continue using existing legacy

system transcend the gap between government and business worlds. These analyses included

evaluation of the current software solution, an overall cost analysis, product longevity, process

improvement, software advantages and disadvantages, implementation processes, ease of use and

support, overall business environment impact, and continuing development of the new packages

offered.

Due to the outdated software technology of the existing system, McSIS, and the new

emerging standards and technologies including the World Wide Web, the twenty-three ITCs’ of

Ohio knew they needed to begin their search for a new SMRS database.4,5 The McSIS database

was developed to operate on an OpenVMS operating system and resided on a VAX computer

system.6,7 New technology options were narrowed down to two options: e-SIS and DASL.

1 ITC – Information Technology Center, also known as a DA Site or Data Analysis Site. 2 e-SIS – Electronic Student Information System 3 DASL – Data Analysis for Student Learning 4 McSIS is also known as POISE and/or Campus America in documentation found on other ITC documentation sites. 5 SMRS – student management record system 6 OpenVMS is an operating system that was originally developed by DEC(Digital Equipment Corporation) 7 VAX is a 32-bit computing system architecture originally developed by DEC in the mid-1907s.

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When ITC directors realized that the SMRS system needed to be updated, a product known as e-

SIS was the only option at the time. Most of the ITC directors concluded that e-SIS was not an

optimal solution because it still required WRQ Reflection software or a dummy terminal.8 E-SIS

is an Oracle database, and is being developed by AAL, Inc., a company based in Canada with

over sixteen years of software development experience. 9

Three ITCs’ converted to the e-SIS system even though the software did not have all the

capabilities that the McSIS software has, and it was not significantly more technologically

advanced than McSIS. Two other ITCs’ and two independent school systems began their

conversion in approximately 2002. Unfortunately, due to the lack of customization and

utilization, many school districts were unhappy with the outcome. Therefore, the remaining ITC

directors chose to wait until a more suitable option was introduced.

Eventually that option was introduced to the ITCs’, it was known as DASL. DASL

development is based on the newest Microsoft SQL and .NET programming technology, making

it attractive to the ITCs who were looking for more modern solutions than e-SIS provided.

DASLs’ development was initiated by NOACSC, in 2003.10 In time, the development and

support of DASL became too large of a project for NOACSC to handle so they enlisted

development help from BIG Solutions.11 In July 2007, ITC directors made the decision to

completely outsource the development and programming to BIG Solutions. NOACSC continues

to develop documentation, test future DASL upgrades and hot fix solutions, and act as the main

support center for the other ITCs’. DASL is currently being used by sixteen ITCs’ and is

continually being improved and customized to meet the needs of Ohio school districts.

NEONET had already converted a few of their schools to the e-SIS solution but

reinitiated their evaluation process of e-SIS when the DASL option was brought forth.12 An

Educational Operating Committee was created to assess the two databases. After researching

both databases, the committee compiled a list of pros and cons, as shown in Table 1, for the

software as well as a cost analysis summary, as shown in Table 2.

8 WRQ Reflection is software that emulates a terminal on a PC and allows users to connect to Unix or OpenVMS systems. 9 AAL - Administrative Assistants Limited 10 NOACSC – Northwest Ohio Area Computer Services Consortium and is based in Lima, Ohio. 11 BIG Solutions – Business Integration Group Solutions based in Cincinnati, Ohio. 12 NEONET - Northeast Ohio Network for Educational Technology

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Table 1: Pros and Cons of DASL versus E-SIS Conversion compiled by NEONET (2003)

DASL E-SIS

Pros Cons Pros Cons

Developed by DA Sites for Ohioans

Not fully developed

Already being used in 5 DA Sites

Progress Book module is untested

Developers know ins and outs of current SMRS package

Hardware specifications have not been made

Has been in use at two DA Sites for five years

Created in Canada and used in other states but has many unnecessary data fields

Users are already familiar with DASL

Ohio Department of Education is not promoting DASL

Fully integrated modules/screens (24 integrated student-based applications)

High Cost of Oracle Licenses

Easier data conversion from current SMRS package

DASL write version is untested in Ohio Schools

Endorsed by the Ohio Department of Education

File conversion from McSIS to ESIS have not been tested

Very few file conversions EMIS and SMRS screens are integrated into one package

Fewer local support staff

Software is owned by the management Council of the Ohio Education Computer Network(MCOECN)

Over 600 standard reports

Current staff is not trained in Oracle

Contributed $109,500 to DASL development as FY04

Future software costs are unknown

Less time training (Reports and Batch jobs named the same)

Enhancements cost more and are harder to request

Supported by 16 DA Sites Duplication of modules i.e. Progress Book

SQL licenses are already purchased

Extra module costs

NEONET staff is familiar with Microsoft operating system and SQL

Higher training costs

Lower costs for enhancements

Minimum customization, GPA and Report Cards

Enhancements are customized for Ohio Schools

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Table 2: Estimated Summary Cost Analysis for September Implementation (2003)

e-SIS DASL

Application Software Maintenance $0.00 $72,000

Database Software Licenses $118,600 $32,000

Database Support and Maintenance $37,097 $0.00

Implementation $13,800 $20,000

Training $41,010 $0.00

Hardware $56,396 $55,000

Total $266,903 $179,000

While it is stated in Table 1 that the ODE was not promoting DASL, it is meant to imply

that ODE was not providing funding for the development of DASL (Woodyard 2008).13

According to Mr. Jerry Woodyard (2008), Executive Director of MDECA, it was found that

ODE financially supported e-SIS in the beginning stages of implementation, but funding was

eventually pulled from the e-SIS project as well.14 Funding for current helpdesk support and

future development of DASL is entirely subsidized by the ITCs’ and the school districts that use

the DASL software. After reviewing both Tables 1 and 2, it is easy to understand why NEONET

and 15 other ITCs’ concluded that DASL was ultimately a better solution regarding cost

effectiveness and overall benefits of implementing DASL instead of e-SIS.

McSIS and DASL

In 1996, the state of Ohio implemented an SMRS known as McSIS, which was the

designated software to help school administrators and instructors to manage records and tracking

functions in educational institutions. The system has been designed for an open

learning/distance education structure and can be used for various types of courses in academia.

Other possible users of the system include an individual tutor, a department or division or an

institution. McSIS is flexible in design and permissions can be regulated to specific job

functions.

13 ODE – Ohio Department of Education 14 MDECA - Metropolitan Dayton Educational Cooperative Association based in Dayton, Ohio.

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McSIS was created using an RMS indexed file (MCOECN 1995).15 “RMS is a set of

generalized services that assist application programs in processing and managing files and their

contents. OpenVMS languages may invoke these services using appropriate macros stored in

system libraries using the OpenVMS calling standard” (Compaq 2002). The RMS indexed file is

one large file that contracts and expands as information is entered and deleted from the system.

To enter information into the RMS Index file, MCOECN used the OpenVMS languages to create

a Menu Processor, which allowed programmers to create various menus in order for users to

enter important student information.

From a user perspective, the McSIS was a text-based interface, accessed using a terminal

or dumb terminal emulator. At the time of its development, the McSIS had been designed to be

used and understood by non-computer experts. Movement around the system is simplified

through a series of menus, which are accessed in a similar manner at all levels. Menu selections,

a standard in many software packages at the time, can be carried out either through using the

arrow keys to highlight a choice and pressing the Enter or Return key, or through typing the first

or highlighted letter of the selection, no support for the mouse was available, there were no

hotlinks or buttons and the function keys were highly utilized. Entering data for a student

required the used of more than one screen. As new information became required, new menus

had to be created in order to accommodate the capturing of that new information. While the

system itself was not internet friendly, the associated training manuals were easily found online

complete with graphical depictions and details. These manuals were most definitely useful as

some tasks were not intuitive, for example, performing a search in McSIS:

When the cursor is placed at the student ID# prompt, press the Backspace/Delete key and

you will be prompted for the “Enter Last Name.” This will appear at the bottom of the

screen, as shown in Figure 1.

15 RMS – Record Management Services

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Figure 1 – McSIS search by last name option

Once a last name is typed in and Enter is pressed, the screen will populate the first

student on to the screen, which is depicted in Figure 2. Each time Enter is pressed the

next student with that last name will then populate the screen.

Figure 2 – McSIS software showing student search result after entering last name

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From a back end perspective, administering the McSIS included creating menus, aliases,

and help files, setting user permissions, and maintaining emulation software. The system existed

on a VAX/VMS platform, now an obsolete operating system. Records were stored in an indexed

file that grew to accommodate the records within. Administrators could also design the system

to run processes as a single process or run them as multiple sub-processes. While the emulation

software freed McSIS from dumb terminal requirement, it was simply just a work around that

required another layer of configuration management. It was decided that McSIS would be

replaced by DASL because of the lack of support, outdated functionality, and elimination of

terminal emulation software.

The newly developed DASL software is a Microsoft SQL database with a web browser

interface, which is compatible with Internet Explorer and Mozilla web browsers. DASL is

compatible with both Windows based and Apple computers without having any additional

software installed. The SQL database is made up of over two hundred-fifty SQL tables and

managed through the SQL Enterprise manager, shown in Figure 3, which resides on a Microsoft

Windows Server.

Figure 3 – SQL Enterprise Management screen

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There are many significant advantages to the DASL software over the McSIS software.

Some of these advantages include a more interpretive GUI, webpage header, and improved

reporting. As shown in Figure 4, the improved GUI interface is an advantage over McSIS

because both a keyboard and mouse can be used. Since a Reflection program is not used, the

keyboard does not have to be reprogrammed in order to navigate and use the menus within the

new SMRS.

Figure 4 – DASL GUI screen capture

As shown in Figure 5, DASL also has a webpage header, which is stationary as a user

moves throughout various menus. The header contains many features that are very intuitive to a

user, especially if the user is accustomed to browsing the internet. Two of these features include

a search engine and the breadcrumb trail. A built in search engine otherwise known as the Go

To box is located in the DASL header. If a user were to type in, for example, the word

“attendance” and then click go; they would receive a list of links related to that word. This aids

the user in finding reports or modules that they are interested in utilizing. The breadcrumb trail

is another way of assisting the user in navigating their way around DASL and is located on the

left side of the second blue line of the webpage header as shown in Figure 5. The breadcrumb

trail populates itself as the user progresses from one menu to the next. The wording in the

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breadcrumb trail also acts as a link which allows the user to progress backwards to a previous

menu in the instance that the user navigated to the wrong menu.

Figure 5 – DASL Header screen capture

The old system, McSIS, used a batch manager to scan the index file for the required

information and compiled the information into a prt file.16,17 The output file could be viewed on

the Reflection window or it could be printed from Reflection program using a line feed printer.

Because Reflection had an ftp client built in, users were able to ftp the prt file to their computer,

convert it to a txt file, and then import the txt file into a program, e.g. Microsoft Excel or Word,

to manipulate the data. It was a very tedious process to get data into a comprehensive format if

the user wanted to use the information in another program.

Querying and exporting information from DASL is much easier because of the SQL

structure and .NET programming. Users can query and compile information by running reports

wizards for different modules within DASL. Most of the reports found in DASL are viewed

using Adobe PDF software. There are some screens that allow users to export information from

DASL into csv files, but these screens are currently very limited.18

Like every piece of software, DASL does have some disadvantages as well. Although

DASL has the main components for everyone to be able to work, it still has room for

improvement for some of the modules as well as the creation of reports that were available in

McSIS but are currently not available in DASL. NOACSC and BIG Solutions maintain a

centralized ticketing system in order help improve DASL as it is developed. DASL Software

Support Coordinators at each ITC report software problems and software enhancement requests

found by support staff and users. As software problems and software enhancement requests are

received, a ticket is created for each and sent to the NOACSC DASL State Support team. Then

16 ftp – file transfer protocol 17 prt – PRT files are created on Unix or open VMS system and contains the data and instructions on how the file should be printed. 18 csv – comma separated values

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as each request or problem is evaluated, prioritized and set to be added to a particular hotfix

and/or upgrade that will be developed throughout the year.

Conversion Encounters

Because NOACSC developed DASL in house, the conversion process from McSIS to

DASL was a fairly smooth transition for most school districts. Unfortunately, every conversion

process is not perfect. During the conversion process from McSIS to DASL, some processes had

to be implemented either before or after the data was transferred from one system to another.

For example, in McSIS, the contact information was spread across at least three different

screens, meaning data was located in more than one table. Another problem that McSIS

produced was that if a contact had more than one phone number, a contact entry had to be

created for each phone number that had to be listed. Therefore, contact codes were created for

the type of phone number being entered. For example, if the father of a student had a pager

number, cell phone number, and a home phone number then the father had three different contact

entries. Code Names were created in the system to represent these numbers, such as “Dad’s

Pager”, “Dad’s Work Number” and “Dad’s Home Phone”.

NOACSC developers eliminated this McSIS flaw in the DASL system by creating one

contact table and multiple phone number fields within the table, which is accessed by the user

through one screen. To ensure the data transferred smoothly during the conversion process from

all three tables into one table, scripts had to be written to transfer the data. Although the data

transferred successfully into the correct data fields, schools still had to go in and eliminate the

multiple entries related to one contact, by combining them all into one entry. They also needed

to clean up old codes that transferred over. Dad’s Pager, Dad’s Work and Dad’s Home Phone all

transferred over so the entries from the previous system could be kept intact. Since all contact

information can be kept on one screen, the codes can now be reduced to generic codes, for

example, Father, Mother, Grandma, Grandpa, etc.

Another example of a conversion problem was how admission and withdraw dates were

handled by McSIS versus DASL. In McSIS, the system allowed students to be withdrawn and

admitted on the same date. DASL did not allow students to be admitted and withdrawn on the

same date. This scenario caused problems in the conversion because when students were

transferred from one building to another within a district they were admitted and withdrawn on

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the same date. Since DASL did not know how to handle the conflicting admission and

withdrawal dates during the conversion, a cleanup process had to be implemented to correct the

admission and withdraw entries after the conversion was completed so the student’s information

would show up correctly in their proper building within the district. Although this was a tedious

process, it only affected a small percentage of enrolled students.

Training

Approximately every eight weeks, a handful of school districts and/or community schools

were converted from McSIS to DASL. During this eight week time period, the school’s

employees, mostly secretaries, not only had to go through data verification and clean up

procedures, but they also had to go through intensive training in order to learn the new system.

The documentation to train users was completed by NOACSC. Given that there were many

modules in DASL, users only needed to attend training sessions related to their specific job

functions. Trainers were employees at each ITC who may have worked with McSIS in the past

and who were currently helping with the conversion of districts from one system to the other.

Training sessions were usually limited to two to three hours at a time, because the

employees who were being trained still had their normal jobs to go back to after training was

completed for the day. They were also the same individuals who were assisting the project

managers in the data verification process. Due to this increase in workload, there were times that

the employees did not accept the fact that DASL was an improvement to their daily job tasks.

However, after the conversion was completed and a period of adjustment to the new software

allowed, the school district employees accepted that DASL was a great improvement to their job

functions.

After all the business analyses, implementation processes, training, and data verification,

it can be seen why the transition was made from McSIS to DASL. DASL was found to be cost

effective, allowed for a smooth transition between the old software to the new, and easily

adaptable to the Ohio’s educational system as it changes and evolves, beneficial to the schools.

In conclusion, DASL can be considered a great technological advance in the educational system

because it is not only an improvement upon the old system, but it also can be easily expanded to

accommodate new school needs as time continues.

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Bibliography

Northeast Ohio Network for Educational Technology. NEONET Technology Advisory

Committee Meeting Minutes. 4 Dec. 2003. 31 Mar. 2008 <http://www.neonetda.org/>. Ohio Educational Computer Network System. OECN System Manager Manual. May 2001. 31

Mar. 2008 <http://www.oecn.k12.oh.us>. OpenVMS Record Management Services Reference Manual. Houston: Compaq Computer Corporation,

2002. 1-444. 31 Mar. 2008 <http://www.hp.com>. Student Services. Metropolitan Dayton Educational Cooperative Association. DASL End User

Documentation. 31 Mar. 2008 <http://www.mdeca.org>. Woodyard, Jerry. Personal interview. 2 Apr. 2008.