Blackboard Degradation in Performance

Friends,

As announced previously, our Blackboard environment continues to experience a degradation in performance that is directly related to the size of some tables in the database that contains statistical information. We have received considerable feedback about the importance of this data to faculty and college administration, and have therefore postponed the trimming of these tables. Although we would have preferred to wait until after to the holiday break to reduce the data in these tables, the Blackboard system is now experiencing degradation once again and it is my opinion that any further postponement represents an unacceptable risk, especially for the Eli classes at Northern Virginia Community College (since they will be using Blackboard during the break).

Later today, the Blackboard staff will coordinate with the database administrators to begin trimming these tables by removing all data in them prior to September 1, 2005. This action will reduce the size of the problem tables by about 32 million lines. This should be enough to get us safely through the break after which time we will initiate conversations with Blackboard to seek a permanent fix to this issue or develop a work around so valuable data is available as needed. It is important to note, that none of this data will be lost, but archived in another location. After the break, we will work on how to make the archived tables accessible to the colleges and trim the production tables back further as necessary ongoing performance and stability (keeping only the most recent 4 weeks).

It is extremely unfortunate that in the short term we are forced to choose between system stability and easy access to statistical information and, as I stated, we will take up this issue with Blackboard after the holidays. Long-term, we will provide some additional options to provide for both. In the meantime, I sincerely appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Best regards and happy holidays to all,

H. Neil Matkin
Vice Chancellor, Information Technology Services
Virginia Community College System
nmatkin@vccs.edu