Using Snapshots

The data in your institution's data source can change frequently, as students, courses, and staff members change. When DORIS performs an ingestion on the current entity configurations, all the data as it exists on that specific date is captured. This means that you can always get the most current data about your institution. However, the current data may provide only part of the picture. If you want to look at trends or see what your institution looked like in previous years, you need to have a way to reproduce the data from the past.

DORIS allows you to take a "snapshot" of the data in your data source at a specific time, and save that snapshot for later use. This is useful when you need to capture and archive the data about your institution at a specific date and time, such as may be required for some reports. Snapshots taken at the same time every year (on the Fall Census date, for example) can be used for year-over-year (or longitudinal) comparisons.

You can schedule an ingestion to run at a pre-determined time (such as a specific date to be used for a report or survey) and DORIS will perform an ingestion of the data in the system, and create a snapshot of the data. Each snapshot is identified by the creation or census date used for the ingestion.

You can also apply one or more tags to a scheduled ingestion so that you know what characteristic(s) the snapshot is associated with. For example, you might use the Fall Census tag for snapshots taken on the official day of record for the Fall term each year.

Applications such as IRIS prioritize use of certain snapshots based on relevance of the snapshot date against the intended reporting range.

If you query DORIS from Evisions Argos, and you do not supply a snapshot definition for the query, only the current data from DORIS is returned.

 

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