What is a data mart?
A data mart is a subset of a data warehouse. It stores highly organized data for a particular function or team such as marketing, sales or finance.
A data mart just stores a subset of data such as transaction history, list of products or inventory records.
Just like a data warehouse, data marts store structured and filtered data in columns and rows, making it faster and easier to access data.
Why should you store data in data marts?
Since they only store data for a specific business function, data marts are simple and easy to set up and access.
While data warehouses are large and their size ranges from 100 GB to 1 TB, data marts are much smaller with a size less than 100 GB. As a result, they're cheaper than data warehouses.
What are the different types of data marts?
Data marts can either be created from an existing warehouse or from internal and/or external sources of data. There are three types of data marts:
- Dependent data mart: Created from an existing data warehouse
- Independent data mart: Created as a stand-alone system, without using a central data warehouse
- Hybrid data mart: Created by combining data from an existing data warehouse and other data sources
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