Explaination of Last Week's Problem

Posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2005 - 1:05 pm:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is more information as promised on the condition that happened last week where students were temporarily disabled in Blackboard:

Short Answer
The students were temporarily disabled; all of their data was/is completely intact.

Long answer

The process that loads users into Blackboard is called the snapshot process. Essentially, it is a two-step process. Step one is generating flat files of user data from DS2 and PeopleSoft, and step 2 is to load those files into Blackboard.

When the data files are loaded into Blackboard, there are two methods available; snapshot mode and manual mode. Snapshot mode will do one of three things:

1. Add users to Blackboard who are in the snapshot files but not in Blackboard.
2. Modify users in Blackboard with data from the snapshot files.
3. Disable users in Blackboard who are not in the snapshot file.

Manual mode snapshots only do two things:

1. Add users to Blackboard who are in the snapshot files but not in Blackboard.
2. Modify users in Blackboard with data from the snapshot files.

Until Thursday 9/22, we were running the snapshots in snapshot mode. We would only put students in the file that had recent enrollments. Because only students with recent enrollments were put in the file, students who had gone a while without enrollments became disabled. This is why if a student completely dropped all classes, and essentially had no more enrollments, they would get disabled from Blackboard.

At about midnight Wed. night/Thursday morning, an Oracle database link stopped functioning. When the snapshot process ran, it could not contact the PeopleSoft database, and essentially the snapshot file was created without any students in it. Because we were running snapshot mode snapshots, all the students were disabled.

What we did to fix it:

1. We went straight to the database and re-enabled all students account directly. This is just a flag in the database, and as soon as we had realized what had happened, we ran that update against Blackboard.
2. We changed the snapshot process from “snapshot” mode to “manual” mode. With this change, students will no longer ever get disabled---even if they drop all of their courses.

Matt Lawson
Information Technology Services
Virginia Community College System


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------