Tooling

As part of this project we have learnt that not all the OOTB tools will meat our criteria, or represent VLE data in much of a meaningful manner.   We tried commercial tools, OSS tools, and even some rudimentary spreadsheet representations.  None of which really came up to scratch. 

Part of the problem, is that it is really hard to get a product to show you meaningful output if you: 

1. Dont asking reasonable questions of it, and 
2. If you dont know what your data is actually telling you. 

As a result of this one of our developers has written some custom perl to extract useful statistics from the data.  We needed to use something that was quite capable of munging large volumes of data as our SQL activity data contained over 200 million rows over the period that we have retained our data. 

This perl script can be found here held in the CARET public SVN repo space -  http://source.caret.cam.ac.uk/svn/projects/vledata/Sakai-Stats/  - Please note that while this is a public repository you will not be able to commit changes directly to it.  We would however love to hear from you if you take this code and use it, or modify it for your own needs.