Data Warehouse and Data Mart – Comparison
Data warehousing and Data mart are tools used in data storage. With the passage of time, small companies become big and this is when they realize that they have amassed huge amounts of data in various departments of the organization. Every department has its own database that works well for that department. But when organizations intend to sort data from various departments for sales, marketing or making plans for the future, the process is referred to as Data Mining. Data Warehousing and Data Marts are two tools that help companies in this regard. Just what the difference between data warehousing and data marts is and how they compare with each other is what this article intends to explain.
Data Warehousing:
A data warehouse is a collection of data marts representing historical data from different operations in the company. This data is stored in a structure optimized for querying and data analysis as a data warehouse. Table design, dimensions, and organization should be consistent throughout a data warehouse so that reports or queries across the data warehouse are consistent. A data warehouse can also be viewed as a database for historical data from different functions within a company. This is the place where all the data of a company is stored. It is actually a very fast computer system having a large storage capacity. It contains data from all the departments of the company where it is constantly updated to delete redundant data. This tool can answer all complex queries pertaining to data.
Data Mart: A data mart is a segment of a data warehouse that can provide data for reporting and analysis on a section, unit, department or operation in the company, e.g., sales, payroll, production. Data marts are sometimes complete individual data warehouses which are usually smaller than the corporate data warehouse. It is an indexing and &traction system. Instead of putting the data from all the departments of a company into a warehouse, data mart contains a database of separate departments and can come up with information using multiple databases when asked.
IT managers of any growing company are always confused as to whether they should make use of data marts or instead switch over to the more complex and more expensive data warehousing/these tools are easily available in the market but pose a dilemma to IT managers.
