Data warehousing is crucial for businesses to make informed decisions. Data marts, focused on specific departments, are combined to support the entire company’s information system. Usability and design depend on the company’s needs. Data warehouses are created by adding data over time and are invaluable for strategic planning.
Data warehousing has become increasingly important to modern businesses as the amount of data needed to stay competitive and make informed decisions about a company’s future has become ever greater. A company’s entire data warehouse is often made up of a collection of data marts, data sets that are typically focused on a particular department or area of the company. Combined into a data mart warehouse, these data marts help support the information system of the entire company.
A data mart could be dedicated to customer data or sales information, or it could be built specifically to support a company’s HR department. In some cases, data marts are populated from data from the main data warehouse. Many companies, however, take a bottom-up approach to data warehousing and instead build their entire data warehouse by compiling data mart data into smaller systems, then combining them into an enterprise-wide data warehouse.
An important factor in building a data mart is usability. Since the data mart is usually aimed at providing information to a specific department for a specific purpose, the data must be easily accessible and processed. A company’s information technology department or management information systems specialists often focus on this area, ensuring that a user-friendly interface exists so that employees, including managers and other staff level, can access data mart data and use it in the course of their work.
The individual design of the data mart depends on the specific needs of the company or the individual department. Most data is organized in relational databases, with a database management system implemented enterprise-wide to allow individual employees to easily access data, generate reports, or perform other necessary day-to-day functions. Some companies require more complex data processing that makes use of multidimensional databases. Still others use the database functionality that allows for the analysis of multidimensional data while using the simpler and less expensive relational database management system.
For the most part, data warehouses are created by adding data as it enters a company’s systems. Data updates are not as important to an overall view of business performance as data that has been added and compiled over a longer period of time. Managers can use the data mart data to visualize company trends, sales patterns and efficiency of individual departments, and to make predictions about future performance. At this level of strategic planning, the data mart and data warehouse are invaluable to those planning the future of the business.
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