Glossary

Athena

Amazon’s serverless SQL query engine. Panorama uses it to create the data lake raw tables and views and to serve the BI tool.

base partition

A partition common to a whole installation, not derived from a source field (for example lms=<host>). It separates data from different installations inside a shared data lake. See Extract and Load: the data pipeline.

base prefix

An optional name/subdirectory that groups tables of the same kind of system (for example openedx or moodle), used in the S3 path and in default Athena table names.

curated view

An Athena view in the upper pipeline layer that joins, filters, and adds calculated fields on top of the typed table views. Dashboards read curated views.

data lake

The S3-based store of raw CSV files plus the Glue/Athena catalog that describes them.

DashboardType

A backend admin model that groups QuickSight dashboards by function or audience and can be marked available to students. See Open edX Backend: administration.

ELT

Extract, Load, Transform. Panorama extracts and loads raw data first, then transforms it with SQL in the data lake. The extraction agent is panorama-elt.

embed URL

A short-lived Amazon QuickSight URL that renders a dashboard for a specific user. The backend generates it; the MFE embeds it.

field partition

An optional split of a large table into multiple CSV files by the value of one or more fields. Enables incremental updates. See Extract and Load: the data pipeline.

incremental update

Uploading only the field partitions that changed within a configured interval, instead of the whole table. Requires field partitioning. See Extract and Load: the data pipeline.

MFE

Micro-frontend. The Open edX pattern of independent React front-end applications. frontend-app-panorama is Panorama’s MFE.

mode

The backend’s running mode: DEMO, FREE, SAAS, or CUSTOM. It decides where dashboards come from and who can see them. See Open edX Backend: Panorama modes.

QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight, the BI and dashboard-embedding service used in the standard Panorama setup.

raw table

An external Athena table over the uploaded CSV files where every column is a string. Named <base_prefix>_raw_<table> by default.

table view

The first transformation layer: a view over a raw table that casts numeric and date fields and converts the literal 'NULL' to real NULL. Named <base_prefix>_table_<table> by default.

Back to Home