Sakai External Database MOTHRA Data

MOTHRA is the central campus repository for information about campus users and accounts. It collects data from other source systems on campus and merges information with the intent of resolving information about each user. Sakai will use information from the MOTHRA system to refernce both personal information about users and as source of unique identification of users.

MOTHRA Data Architecture

The following MOTHRA database objects are necessary when collecting information about campus accounts:

For more information about these Mothra tables and their data, please see https://confluence.ucdavis.edu/confluence/download/attachments/6851892/cMothraTables.doc.

Requirements

• Availability: The MOTHRA data used by Sakai must be available on a 24x7 basis.
• Refresh: Given that user information about users changes rarely, a nightly feed should be initially sufficient.

Design

The MOTHRA feed will use a rather standard table and pl/sql feed approach built for MyUCDavis several years ago. The feed procedure's algorithm is as follows:

for each user in MOTHRA
   attempt to update the local row with the current mothra data

Test users

LDAP

Eventually, it may be possible to move away from MOTHRA and instead get this type of information from the Campus LDAP directory. However, before this can be done, Sakai must be upgraded to handle multiple sources of id information from each source system.

Implementation

The initial implementation of a Mothra Feed used a database link to the MyUCDavis CourseManagement database to do a nightly truncate a fill of person data. Since then, the feed procedure has been enhanced