Banner Operational Data Store (ODS) is designed to support the operational, tactical and strategic reporting needs of St. Louis Community College. When Banner ODS is combined with the Cognos reporting tool, business users at all levels of the institution have access to operational data formatted in a manner that facilitates reporting.

Banner ODS provides operational reporting for the Banner Student and Banner HR systems. ODS simplifies reporting by taking a snapshot of the data from the Banner System and creating views that are organized by business functionality; i.e. Student, Bursar, Admissions, Financial Aid, and HR. The system is primarily accessed through the use of IBM Cognos: Enterprise Reporting Tool which provides a standardised data model for self-service operational reporting.

Unlike real-time Banner data that is constantly changing, the ODS takes a snapshot of Banner data every night; thereby providing a static view that is useful for consistent point-in-time reporting. Put simply, the purpose of the ODS is operational and ad-hoc reporting. It is primarily used for daily operational reporting after being refreshed overnight. Also contains frozen data captured as copies of a subset of this data on key event dates such as CENSUS, and End of Term.