UNC Charlotte is in the process of installing a new product from Sunguard SCT Higher Education called the Operational Data Store.  The ODS makes reporting easier by providing a few BIG tables to report from instead of thousands of small tables.  Complicated "joins" are done for you behind the scene.  For example, the ODS provides a view named PERSON that has 151 fields from 15 different Banner tables.

Additionally, the ODS provides documentation that will enable developers to find the table/field information they are looking for quickly, easily, and with a high level of confidence.

The first type of documentation is called the ODS Reporting View Meta Data Reports.  These are HTML documents that list all the ODS views and allow you to drill-down on each view to see the tables, fields, and forms behind it. 

The second type of documentation is called the ODS Business Concept Diagrams.  These are "Entity-Relationship-Diagrams" that show not only the fields available in an ODS view, but also the relationships among the fields. For example, it shows that a person can have one address, more than one address, or no address. 

Other information available for each field includes (a) the Banner Form in which it was entered, (b) the table it came from, and (c) the names of other ODS views that contain it.