Data Hub is part of the Brightspace Core package and provides access to your organization's data for data mining, research, and analysis.
Data is the fundamental building block in the process to answer questions and enable conversations around usage, engagement, adoption, assessment, and more. Data Hub allows administrators to access collections of data (data sets) from Brightspace and export them as CSV files for further analysis in third party tools. This gives administrators the flexibility to filter, aggregate, and transform the data according to their needs.
Data Hub is available to all Brightspace Core customers.
Navigate Data Hub
Click Data Hub on your navbar to open the Data Hub landing page.
Figure: Select the Data Sets tab to see a list of available data sets.
The Data Sets tab has a table containing all available data sets, which you can sort by Name, Category, or Description. You can use the Search field to search for a specific data set.
The Job Status tab lists the submission date and status of Advanced Data Sets. The link to download an ADS export is available on this tab for 30 days after it was generated.
Data set types
The following data set types are available in Data Hub:
- Brightspace Data Sets are tables of raw, user-level data from Brightspace. They are designed to be joined together to build your own reports. Users do not set filters for these reports as all data is included. Brightspace Data Sets execute on a scheduled task.
- Advanced Data Sets are reports that combine data from multiple Brightspace Data Sets. Administrators can generate them as needed by defining one or more filters such as dates and org units. The data behind these data sets is updated daily.
Full data sets and differential data sets
To analyze and report on the data, Brightspace Data Sets are available in both full data sets and differentials. Full data sets, which contain a complete view of historical data, are larger and take longer to download. Differential data sets only contain the data that has been changed since the last successful run, making them smaller, more up-to-date, and faster to download.
Note the following about differential data sets:
- To prevent data gaps, updated data sets include some overlap. For example, an updated data set may contain rows from the last few minutes of the previous hour and the next few minutes of the next hour.
- Only inserts or updates display, including updates to existing IsDeleted columns.
- Only updates on first-class data display. For example, the Quiz Attempts data set displays additional attempts; however, updates to the QuizName field do not display.
BDS Schedules
Brightspace Data Sets run on a schedule designed by D2L to optimize performance across all our clients. Please be aware that the scheduled time is for the initiation of the data set generation. We do not provide guarantees of how long the data set generation will take to complete.
With the default schedule, full data sets refresh once a week and differential data sets refresh once a day.
There are two paid add-on packages for more frequent data generation. To purchase an add-on for Data Hub, contact your D2L Account Manager.
Hourly Differentials add-on
With this package, differential data sets refresh every hour instead of once a day. Full data sets refresh once a day instead of once a week.
This can be helpful for administrators with high-frequency reporting needs, who have automated processes, reports, or dashboards set up.
Daily Fulls and Daily Diffs add-on
With this package, full data sets refresh once a day instead of once a week. Differential data sets continue to refresh once a day.
This can be helpful for administrators who are learning to use differentials and need space to expand their data operations.
Data Limits
Most Brightspace Data Sets adhere to the default system limit to return 150 million rows of the most recent data.
The following Brightspace Data Sets are limited by date, not by number of rows:
- Three years of data (the previous two calendar years and the current calendar year to date):