Data Warehousing and Data Mining
Data Warehouses and Data Marts: A Dynamic View
file:///E|/FrontPage Webs/Content/EISWEB/DWDMDV.html
Data Warehouses and Data Marts: A Dynamic View By Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D. White Paper No. Three March 27, 1997
Patterns of Data Mart Development In the beginning, there were only the islands of information: the operational data stores and legacy systems that needed enterprise-wide integration; and the data warehouse: the solution to the problem of integration of diverse and often redundant corporate information assets. Data marts were not a part of the vision. Soon though, it was clear that the vision was too sweeping. It is too difficult, too costly, too impolitic, and requires too long a development period, for many organizations to directly implement a data warehouse. A data mart, on the other hand, is a decision support system incorporating a subset of the enterprise’s data focused on specific functions or actvities of the enterprise. Data marts have specific business-related purposes such as measuring the impact of marketing promotions, or measuring and forecasting sales performance, or measuring the impact of new product introductions on company profits, or measuring and forecasting the performance of a new company division. Data Marts are specific business-related software applications. Data marts may incorporate substantial data, even hundreds of gigabytes, but they contain much less data than would a data warehouse developed for the same company. Also since data marts are focused on relatively specific business purposes, system planning and requirements analysis are much more manageable processes, and consequently design, implementation, testing and installation are all much less costly than for data warehouses. In brief, data marts can be delivered in a matter of months, and for hundreds of thousands, rather than millions of dollars. That defines them as within the range of divisional or departmental budgets, rather than as projects needing
file:///E|/FrontPage Webs/Content/EISWEB/DWDMDV.html
Data Warehouses and Data Marts: A Dynamic View By Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D. White Paper No. Three March 27, 1997
Patterns of Data Mart Development In the beginning, there were only the islands of information: the operational data stores and legacy systems that needed enterprise-wide integration; and the data warehouse: the solution to the problem of integration of diverse and often redundant corporate information assets. Data marts were not a part of the vision. Soon though, it was clear that the vision was too sweeping. It is too difficult, too costly, too impolitic, and requires too long a development period, for many organizations to directly implement a data warehouse. A data mart, on the other hand, is a decision support system incorporating a subset of the enterprise’s data focused on specific functions or actvities of the enterprise. Data marts have specific business-related purposes such as measuring the impact of marketing promotions, or measuring and forecasting sales performance, or measuring the impact of new product introductions on company profits, or measuring and forecasting the performance of a new company division. Data Marts are specific business-related software applications. Data marts may incorporate substantial data, even hundreds of gigabytes, but they contain much less data than would a data warehouse developed for the same company. Also since data marts are focused on relatively specific business purposes, system planning and requirements analysis are much more manageable processes, and consequently design, implementation, testing and installation are all much less costly than for data warehouses. In brief, data marts can be delivered in a matter of months, and for hundreds of thousands, rather than millions of dollars. That defines them as within the range of divisional or departmental budgets, rather than as projects needing