Stable and High-Performing Solution for Online Data Analytics

Customer

Technocentrum Utrecht (TCU), a partnership of business and technical training centers, focuses on knowledge reinforcement and renewal, as well as on better integration between vocational technical education and current professional practice.

Challenge

To store a large amount of diverse data on the educational system, the Customer was continuously creating temporary data tables. Such ineffective storage of information prevented getting valuable insights based on the data. Therefore, the Customer needed to systematize all the available data, enable data import as well as create statistical reports.

Solution

ScienceSoft designed a website that allowed users to create statistical reports on the educational system development at the country level. The website was complemented with a specially developed database. Now reports are built based on given criteria and parameters and are presented as tables or graphs. The dynamic query generator allows users to set the necessary parameters in a form and dynamically change additional parameters.

ScienceSoft’s team implemented the features for:

• different grouping levels
• total sum calculations
• creation of tables and graphs based on the data input by users

ScienceSoft developed a special module for adding and deleting data, and introduced automatic backups to prevent data loss while importing.

The built-in article system allows specifying access for different groups of users. All the articles are divided into three groups:

• static pages
• reference articles
• pages with statistical reports

Pages with statistical data are unique for each year under review.

Results

The website allowed to decrease the number of data tables by 3 times and the amount of duplicated data by 5 times; data storage, analysis and visualization were improved via the implementation of the database, the dynamic query generator and a special module for data manipulation. ScienceSoft’s team introduced a feature for protection from improper user actions, "incomplete" and / or "incorrect" data entry in the database/PHP content. Overall, ScienceSoft’s agile website development team managed to improve the system stability and performance.

Technologies and Tools

CMS: Drupal 6

Additional modules: Taxonomy, CCK

Database: MySQL 5.x

Language: PHP 5.2.x

Webserver: Apache 2.x

Frontend: AJAX, JavaScript/JQuery, XHTML

IDE: Eclipse, NetBeans

Operating system: Linux, Windows