What is Data Mart?

A Data Mart is a subset of a directorial information store, generally oriented to a specific purpose or primary data subject which may be distributed to provide business needs. Data Marts are analytical record stores designed to focus on particular business functions for a specific community within an organization. Data marts are derived from subsets of data in a data warehouse, though in the bottom-up data warehouse design methodology, the data warehouse is created from the union of organizational data marts.

The fundamental use of a data mart is Business Intelligence (BI) applications. BI is used to gather, store, access, and analyze record. It can be used by smaller businesses to utilize the data they have accumulated since it is less expensive than implementing a data warehouse.

Reasons for creating a data mart

• Creates collective data by a group of users
• Easy access to frequently needed data
• Ease of creation
• Improves end-user response time
• Lower cost than implementing a complete data warehouses
• Potential clients are more clearly defined than in a comprehensive data warehouse
• It contains only essential business data and is less cluttered.

Types of Data Marts

There are mainly two approaches to designing data marts. These approaches are

• Dependent Data Marts
• Independent Data Marts

Dependent Data Marts

A dependent data marts is a logical subset of a physical subset of a higher data warehouse. According to this technique, the data marts are treated as the subsets of a data warehouse. In this technique, firstly a data warehouse is created from which further various data marts can be created. These data mart are dependent on the data warehouse and extract the essential record from it. In this technique, as the data warehouse creates the data mart; therefore, there is no need for data mart integration. It is also known as a top-down approach.

Independent Data Marts

The second approach is Independent data marts (IDM) Here, firstly independent data marts are created, and then a data warehouse is designed using these independent multiple data marts. In this approach, as all the data marts are designed independently; therefore, the integration of data marts is required. It is also termed as a bottom-up approach as the data marts are integrated to develop a data warehouse.

Other than these two categories, one more type exists that is called "Hybrid Data Marts."

Hybrid Data Marts

It allows us to combine input from sources other than a data warehouse. This could be helpful for many situations; especially when Adhoc integrations are needed, such as after a new group or product is added to the organizations.

Steps in Implementing a Data Mart

The significant steps in implementing a data mart are to design the schema, construct the physical storage, populate the data mart with data from source systems, access it to make informed decisions and manage it over time. So, the steps are:

Designing

The design step is the first in the data mart process. This phase covers all of the functions from initiating the request for a data mart through gathering data about the requirements and developing the logical and physical design of the data mart.

It involves the following tasks:

1. Gathering the business and technical requirements
2. Identifying data sources
3. Selecting the appropriate subset of data
4. Designing the logical and physical architecture of the data mart.

Constructing

This step contains creating the physical database and logical structures associated with the data mart to provide fast and efficient access to the data.

It involves the following tasks:

1. Creating the physical database and logical structures such as tablespaces associated with the data mart.
2. creating the schema objects such as tables and indexes describe in the design step.
3. Determining how best to set up the tables and access structures.

Populating

This step includes all of the tasks related to the getting data from the source, cleaning it up, modifying it to the right format and level of detail, and moving it into the data mart.

It involves the following tasks:

1. Mapping data sources to target data sources
2. Extracting data
3. Cleansing and transforming the information.
4. Loading data into the data mart
5. Creating and storing metadata

Accessing

This step involves putting the data to use: querying the data, analyzing it, creating reports, charts and graphs and publishing them.

It involves the following tasks:

1. Set up and intermediate layer (Meta Layer) for the front-end tool to use. This layer translates database operations and objects names into business conditions so that the end-clients can interact with the data mart using words which relates to the business functions.
2. Set up and manage database architectures like summarized tables which help queries agree through the front-end tools execute rapidly and efficiently.

Managing

This step contains managing the data mart over its lifetime. In this step, management functions are performed as:

1. Providing secure access to the data.
2. Managing the growth of the data.
3. Optimizing the system for better performance.
4. Ensuring the availability of data event with system failures.

Difference between Data Warehouse and Data Mart