PowerSchool: Set-Up
To begin using the PowerSchool (Data Extractor) with Discovery’s Acorn there are a few things you will need to set-up at your school/district before you begin:
- You must set up Acorn on a computer that has network access to your PowerSchool data.
- Data extraction from PowerSchool requires an ODBC DSN that has read access to the PowerSchool database. If you are using PowerSchool Premier your server is most likely an Oracle server, though may be on a Sybase server. The next step will help you determine if the ODBC DSN is set up on your machine, if you do not already have an ODBC DSN move on to “Creating a new ODBC DSN”
To check for an existing ODBC DSN:
- Open the Windows Data Sources (ODBC) control panel:
- From the Start menu, choose Control Panel.
- On Windows 2000/XP/Vista, open the Administrative Tools folder.
- Double-click the Data Sources (ODBC) icon.
- On the User DSN or System DSN tab, in the User Data Sources or System Data Sources list, check for an entry that matches your school’s information.
- Note the name of the DSN if you found one, this is the same name that you will enter in the DSN field in the Discovery Data Extractor later.
Creating a new ODBC DSN:
If you have no ODBC DSN entries matching your school, please follow these steps to add an ODBC DSN for Oracle Server or Sybase Server:
For this set up you will need the following information:
- The name of the PowerSchool MS SQL server.
- The name of the PowerSchool database on the MS SQL server.
- Username and Password for an account that has a minimum of read access to the appropriate views in the PowerSchool database.
Follow the instruction on the appropriate set up page:
- For Oracle Servers: Oracle ODBC setup page to setup and configure your ODBC connection and drivers.
- For Sybase Servers: Sybase ODBC setup page to setup and configure your ODBC connection and drivers.
Your Data Source is now set up and ready to be used by Acorn.
Move on to PowerSchool: Connections