A Brief History

A Brief History

The WebDB project was originally conceived in 1996 by the Earlham College Database Administrator's group (the DBA group). The DBA group was originally a collection of computer science students and Charlie Peck ('84), the CS faculty member, who worked with Computing Services and were responsible for the maintenance of the College's administrative databases. Since the inception of WebDB, the group has changed significantly. Having completed a production quality version of WebDB, the group changed its name to the WebDB Group and, among other things, one of the past members, Dusko Koncaliev, graduated and has since taken the position of the faculty adviser.

WebDB has evolved considerably since it was first released 1997. Built on top of the Banner data model which is housed in an Oracle relational database management system, WebDB is now in it's 3rd major release. Banner was purchased to replace the home-grown software that had for many years supported the administrative functions of the College. Much of the functionality of WebDB would not be possible without the sophistication of the Banner data model.

The idea of WebDB was a product of many discussions about the volume of time, money, and paper that was spent creating, distributing, and absorbing printed documents related to grades, course registration, and scheduling. As a result, the DBA group set about simplifying and making more convenient the arduous processing of printed documents by creating an Web interface.