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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: What is a 'data mart'?
I think this discussion has overlooked the most critical issue, the
political one.
When the term data warehouse was coined, the proponents were too zealous. Their ambition was to store ALL an organization's data. These first projects generally failed because they were too broad and took years to complete, if they weren't abandoned first. So data warehouse acquired a stigma. Data warehouses were bad. No ambitious senior manager wanted to propose one. So people coined the term data mart. This sounded less ambitious, less offensive. So we have a strange situation where the field is called data warehousing, but nobody will agree that they have one. Instead, if you ask point-blank, you get a lot of hemming and hawing and well it isn't "really" a data warehouse, more of a large data mart, etc. IMHO that is why the terms are so confusing.
Dennis Williams
DBA, 60%OCP, 100% DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 6:52 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
You may find the answer from
" Oracle9i Data Warehousing Guide "
from Figure 1-2 Architecture of a Data Warehouse to Figure 1-4 Architecture of a Data Warehouse with a Staging Area and Data Marts
In general (not restrict to Oracle), data warehouse refers to integration of databases in various types (including mainstream, text ... data sources).
Johnny
>>> ktoepke_at_rlcarriers.com 04/29/03 02:51PM >>> <rant>
I went to a DataWarehousing conference and after 5 days of
classes,
I was able to finally figure out what a DW is.
The level of agreement among the various camps is that a DW is
a
non-transactional database.
Some camps say that a DW Must be a star schema. Others say that
it
cannot be. Some say that a DW can only be used to feed DataMarts,
another
says that it is the database that is queried. One says that the DW
cannot be
operationally populated or queried the other encourages it.
There is even less agreement as to what a DataMart is. It
boiled
down to a DataMart being data that can be queried. Could be a DW
itself. A
database optimized for query. A single star schema. A set of related
tables.
In summary. A DataWarehouse is a database. And a DataMart is
data.
</rant>
My personal opinion is that a DW is more of an large-scale solution. It
is
designed to store, manage and analyze data from the enterprise,
department
or even a region. A DataMart is smaller in scale -- sales for the
region,
purchasing for the enterprise, etc.
In either case, the DW/DM is periodically populated from operational
data
and is organized to allow for efficient querying.
Kevin
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 2:53 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Ive read some documentation and its not 100% clear on what this means.
I
think people use the terminology differently. I take it to mean that
you can
have one main warehouse environment where you have a repository of
your
data, then you can publish parts of that data warehouse to individual
data
marts which are simply subsets of the data warehouse.
Are data marts OLAPs? or is the terminology used with transaction
processing
as well?
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Author: Johnny Zhang
INET: JZhang_at_seton.org
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Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services ---------------------------------------------------------------------To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). Received on Wed Apr 30 2003 - 12:41:53 CDT
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