Although both solutions offer access to Blackboard data and allow us to use queries to retrieve information, Illuminate and DDA are very different.

DDA is a complete, nearly real-time copy of the Blackboard transactional database. Therefore, it contains most of the specific data you may need, generally organized to run the application rather than to create reports. In practice, this means that you may need to run fairly complex queries to obtain the data you are looking for, and it is also subject to incremental changes over time. It also does not include data from integrated services such as Collaborate, SafeAssign, Ally, or other tools.

You can consult the official Blackboard information about DDA in this article.

Illuminate (formerly known as Blackboard Data) is a data warehouse containing transformed data collected from various sources, including Blackboard. The various sources are updated at different frequencies, while Blackboard data is updated daily. As a data warehouse, the data is organized in a way that makes it more useful for reporting and analysis, and it includes historical records that have been deleted from the original sources. Additionally, it is only a dataset that does not contain everything; you may need something that is not included. The full dataset is available through developer access, and the curation performed, which focuses on information related to adoption and usage, is available at https://illuminate.blackboard.com

Here you can consult the information about Illuminate.

To access Illuminate, you will need credentials, which you can request by following these instructions.