What is the Difference Between Data Warehouse and Data Mart

The main difference between data warehouse and data mart is that data warehouse is a system that allows data consolidation, analysis and reporting in order to make business decisions while a data mart is a subset of a data warehouse that focuses on a single functional area of an organization.

A data warehouse is a system that helps to analyze data, create reports and visualize them in order to make business decisions. It improves business intelligence activities. A data warehouse must be designed according to organizational requirements. On the other hand, a data mart is a subset of a data warehouse that provides data integrity and security.

Key Areas Covered

1. What is Data Warehouse
      – Definition, Functionality
2. What is Data Mart
     – Definition, Functionality
3. What is the Difference Between Data Warehouse and Data Mart
     – Comparison of Key Differences

Key Terms

Data Warehouse, Data Mart

What is Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is a repository that collects data from various operational systems. It captures data from data sources to analyze them and take business insights. Data warehouses obtain data from multiple data sources. Moreover, these data sources can be operational systems such as Excel, ERP, CRM or financial applications or databases such as MySQL, MSSQL, and Oracle, etc. All the data is extracted, transformed and loaded into the warehouse. We call this process ETL process. Then, the data is integrated and processed to take valuable business insights. Furthermore, there are business intelligence software programs to access and analyzes data within the warehouse.

Data warehouse provides multiple advantages. It separates the analytical process from the operational processes and enables business users to access and query-relevant data faster. It also improves data consistency and quality. Moreover, Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery are cloud-based data warehouses. They reduce the cost of initial infrastructure and ongoing maintenance.

What is Data Mart

A data mart is a small repository of data. Each data mart contains data required by specific users. In an organization, the sales department and inventory departments have separate data marts. Furthermore, it is an independent subsystem of a data warehouse.

There are three types of data marts as a dependent data mart, independent data mart and hybrid data mart. A dependent data mart obtains data from a single data warehouse and improves centralization. An independent data mart does not use a central data warehouse. Thus, it is more suitable for small groups in an organization. Hybrid data mart, on the other hand, combines input from data sources that are not part of the data warehouse. Therefore, they are more flexible and suitable for organizations with multiple databases.

Difference Between Data Warehouse and Data Mart

Definition

A data warehouse is a central location which stores consolidated data from multiple databases while a data mart is a repository of data that is designed to serve a particular community of knowledge workers. Thus, this is the main difference between data warehouse and data mart.

Objective

The objective of a data warehouse is to support business intelligence, batch reporting, and data visualization. The objective of a data mart, however, is to store and use data by a specific user community.

Data Capture

Another difference between data warehouse and data mart is data capture. Data warehouse captures data from multiple data sources while data mart captures data from a data warehouse or operational systems or external sources.

Usage

Moreover, data warehouse allows collecting data from multiple sources and analyzing them to take business decisions whereas data mart allows storing data relevant to specific business groups with the organization to access data easily and faster. Hence, this is another difference between data warehouse and data mart.

Conclusion

The main difference between data warehouse and data mart is that data warehouse is a system that allows data consolidation, analysis and reporting to take business decisions while a data mart is a subset of a data warehouse that focuses on a single functional area of an organization.

Reference:

1. “What Is Data Warehouse? – Definition from WhatIs.com.” SearchDataManagement, Available here.
2. “What Is Data Mart (Datamart)? – Definition from WhatIs.com.” SearchDataManagement, Available here.

Image Courtesy:

1. “Data Warehouse Feeding Data Mart” By Jerry vlntn at English Wikibooks – Transferred from en.wikibooks to Commons (Public Domain) via Commons Wikimedia