Data mart - Definition and Overview

A data mart is a specialized version of a data warehouse. Like data warehouses, data marts contain a snapshot of operational data that help businesspeople to strategize based on analyses of past trends and experiences. The key difference is that the creation of a data mart is predicated on a specific, predefined need for a certain grouping and configuration of select data. Since data mart configuration emphasizes easy access to relevant information, the star schema is a fairly popular design choice, as it enables a relational database to emulate a multidimensional database's analytical functionality.

A dependent data mart is a logical subset (view) or a physical subset (extract) of a larger data warehouse, isolated for one of the following reasons:

• A need for a special schema: e.g., to restructure for OLAP
• Performance: to offload the data mart to a separate computer for greater efficiency
• Security: to separate selectively an authorized data subset