A data warehousing workshop of the Village Dynamics in South Asia (VDSA) project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), and jointly implemented by ICRISAT, IRRI and NCAP in partnership with national institutes in Bangladesh and India, was held on 26 March – 6 April at ICRISAT-Patancheru. Microsoft-Sonata is providing the technical support for the VDSA data warehousing initiative.

The objectives of this workshop were to reach a common understanding of the concepts of data warehousing; agree and work towards integration of databases for three regions – SAT India, East India and Bangladesh; and articulate reporting and analytical needs from the data warehouse, such as user interface, canned reports, ad-hoc reports, confidentiality and security features.

Research Program Director for Markets, Institutions and Policies (MIP) and VDSA project leader Dr Cynthia Bantilan highlighted the workshop’s importance in achieving the goals of the data warehousing initiative. Discussions also centered on meso-data related needs (P Parthasarathy Rao) and micro-data and harmonization of data across regions (Uttam Deb, VDSA Project Manager).

Participants of the data warehousing workshop of the Village Dynamics in South Asia

The workshop was attended by project team members from IRRI, NCAP, ICRISAT and Socioconsult (Bangladesh) responsible for database management, and included Piedad F Moya, Esther Marciano and Ma Teresa Ulat (IRRI, Philippines); Alamgir Chowdhury and Mokhlesur Rahman (Socioconsult); Taznoore Samina Khanam (IRRIBangladesh); Rajni Jain, Umesh Yadav and Dushyant Tyagi (NCAP), and members of the VDSA database management team at ICRISAT.

Dileepkumar Guntuku, Trushar Shah and Pradyut Modi of ICRISAT shared their technical expertise at the workshop which had Ankur Bhasin and Manish Kumar Verma from Microsoft-Sonata’s technical team working on the discovery phase of understanding the project’s requirements and developing the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document.

On 3 April, the VDSA team briefed ICRISAT’s Governing Board on the progress made during their visit to the VDSA data bank. The Board highly appreciated the initiative and roadmap towards establishing a VDSA data warehouse by the end of 2012.