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Due to the outdated software technology of the existing system, McSIS, and the new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