Sakai External Database

The Sakai External Database acts as a central location for data storage and presentation to Sakai. As such, it needs to collect information from a variety of sources, and present that information in a manner the central source of most, if not all, data external to Sakai. This data is collected from various campus systems, primarily in the form of database tables and queries. The collected data is then transformed into a single source of data presented in a format amenable to the Sakai provider mechanismmechanisms.

Requirements

1. Support for Varied Data Sourcing: The data being provided to the External Database can come from a number of different sources. The Repository must be able to handle most, if not all, sources of data.
2. Freshness of Data: In some cases, the data being provided to Sakai must be as close to the current state of the data source as possible.
3. Query Execution Speed: Given that the repository generally aggregates data from external sources, the speed by which aggregated data is provided to Sakai must be optimized.
4. Synthesis of Heterogeneous Data: In some cases, multiple data sources may contain similar versions of source data. Care must be taken when synthesizing this data for presentation to Sakai.

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