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PERSON Table/View

(dwadmin.person_all_v)

Explanation

Biographical, demographic and other data about people at Penn who are students. One records exists for each student in the Student Record System (SRS), meaning all students who were enrolled at or on leave from the University Spring 1990 and later.

The table is one of the few which has the student name, not just the identifying number. (See also the ADDRESS Table.) For many reporting purposes, Name or First_Name, Middle_Name, and Last_Name will be the most useful name elements to use.

The table was named PERSON rather than STUDENT to allow the inclusion of other types of people at a future date.

Common Uses

• Generating reports of all students who are female (SEX is 'F') and born before a certain date.
• Determining the numbers of students in particular demographic categories who started study at Penn during a particular term. ("I'd like the male/female ratio of the matriculating class entering in the Fall of 1996.")
• Getting names for students identified elsewhere by PennID. ("List the names and classification for all students living in High Rise East.")

Cautions

• PennID comes from PennCommunity, and occasionally there can be a time-lag between the time a student shows up in the Data Warehouse and when they get a PennID. It is rare but possible for current students to be in the data warehouse without a real PennID. Temporarily, their rows will have an internally-assigned number, beginning with a zero. This is not the student's PennID, and should not be used for any function other than to join tables in the Data Warehouse. Once the student is assigned a real PennID, that will replace the internally-assigned number.
• Email address comes initially from the student's school. Email addresses are sent via batch load to the Online Directory, and from there they are sent via batch to Penn Community. From there, Penn Community sends batch updates to SRS and to the Data Warehouse. Note that students are allowed to put additional email addresses into the Online Directory, but only one address from there is sent to the warehouse and to SRS. If the student indicates a different email address should be the "displayed" address in the Online Directory, that address will considered their "preferred" address and it will be sent to the warehouse and SRS, replacing their initially assigned upenn.edu address. They may still have a valid upenn.edu address, but their "preferred" one will be the address found in the PERSON table.
• Restriction flags for email address and the restrict flag for name come from the Online Directory. If the student is not a current student, his or her restrict flags may be null. Note that this does not mean the information is not restricted. See also the Address table for additional documentation about restrict flags.
• While SSN is the key, it is not visable to most queries and users. Use PennID for identification of individuals in this table. Joins in the Business Objects universes are done on PennID, instead of SSN.
• Use Country of citizenship and Visa together to determine international students' status, following this algorithm:
  

  Visa	Country of Citizenship	Citizenship Status
  Non-Blank, Non-PR, Non-US	BLANK	International
  Non-Blank, Non-PR, Non-US	Non-US	International
  Blank	US	US Citizen
  Blank	BLANK	US Citizen
  PR	US	Permanent Resident
  PR	BLANK	Permanent Resident
  PR	Non-US	Permanent Resident
  Non-Blank, Non-PR	US	this is a data entry error, but assume PR
  Blank	Non-US	assume PR
  US	any value, or BLANK	US Citizen

  • Country of Citizenship and Visa are populated in SRS by a batch feed from the admissions system. Visa should be populated for non-US students only. For schools using College Net, the bio/demo information in SRS is populated once for each student; Undergrad admissions continues to refresh the student's biographic data throughout the admissions cycle. Once the cycle is over and the admissions interfaces begin processing the next year/cycle, these two data elements can be updated in SRS by an interface from International Student Services (ISS). The ISS interface job runs once per week. ISS only updates the data for students who have visas and who are in the ISS system. If SRS does not already have the citizenship and visa info, and ISS has information for the student, the weekly refresh will populate SRS with whatever is in ISS's system. If SRS does not already have the information and ISS does not have it either, the fields will remain blank, unless updates are done manually by the Office of the University Registrar.
    
• "Owner" in the primary key can be ignored. Planned system security on this table will restrict access to users with restricted warehouse access, allowing them to see only the records "owned" by their department or school, as specificied by the value in Owner. When that is implemented, the table security will take Owner into account automatically, so you may ignore it in your queries.

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