The Business Intelligence Team and their institutional partners have maintained a data dictionary for many years, developed in the Oracle APEX framework. Product owners and the team would populate it with the functional and technical definitions of the unique data fields contained within the data warehouse.

With Miami’s Oracle licensing in a sunset phase, a different solution was needed. To continue the best practice of a data dictionary, we have licensed the Data Cookbook (DC) application from IData which is widely used in higher education. Features of Miami's Data Cookbook include:

• It provides one location to store all the business and technical data definitions within its Business Glossary. We have initially populated it with nearly 300 definitions from our legacy data dictionary.
• It enables tracking and visibility into calculated and custom fields, whether in Workday or other applications.
• It can include the documented lineage to show the path and transformation of data.
• Definitions are built through the assistance of a workflow that enables insight into each one’s status (e.g. it is in Joe's queue).