James Dozier (@jdozier) has done it again! Not only did he kick off this entire project with his now renownd KIPP Share post KIPP Network Normed Data Warehouse, but he’s added the first real commit to KIPP Silo. IT is called Silo Conveyor (see what he did there) and is the start of Python script that grabs and adds the AssessmentsResults.csv from the MAP CDF to a database.

NB: this first script is not meant to be intimidating for those less experienced in the dark arts of writing a script to read a data file, create a connection to a database, and load that data into the database. Rather, it simply gives us a glimpse into the direction we would like to head. Clearly written code that not only serves the practical needs of getting our data into a warehouse, but the provide a longer term opportunity to help us each learn how to better do our jobs with these types of tools.

True story: I knew no Python a little over a year ago, but I quickly figured out how to write a simple script that pulls MAP CDFs from NWEA’s MARC site and loads them into a simple database. Andrew Martin (@almartin82) did the same thing. In this case Python was both (i) the right tool for the job and (ii) a relatively straightfoward language to learn. And it has really great facilities for connecting with databases.

I promise to get something up about setting up a SQL Server Database on AWS soon. It will be a gentle, step-by-step guide for getting something up and running.

And again, kudos to James for kicking this thing off right!