Difference Between Data Warehousing and Data Marts

Data Warehousing vs Data Marts

Data warehousing and data mart are tools used in data storage. With passage of time, small companies become big, and this is when they realize that they have amassed huge amounts of data in various departments of the organization. Every department has its own database that works well for that department. But when organizations intend to sort data from various departments for sales, marketing or making plans for future, the process is referred to as Data Mining. Data Warehousing and Data Marts are two tools that help companies in this regard. Just what the difference between data warehousing and data marts is and how they compare with each other is what this article intends to explain.

Data Warehousing

This is the place where all the data of a company is stored. It is actually a very fast computer system having a large storage capacity. It contains data from all the departments of the company where it is constantly updated to delete redundant data. This tool can answer all complex queries pertaining data.

Data Mart

It is an indexing and extraction system. Instead of putting the data from all the departments of a company into a warehouse, data mart contains database of separate departments and can come up with information using multiple databases when asked.

IT managers of any growing company are always confused as to whether they should make use of data marts or instead switch over to the more complex and more expensive data warehousing. These tools are easily available in the market, but pose a dilemma to IT managers.

Difference between Data Warehousing and Data Mart

It is important to note that there are huge differences between these two tools though they may serve same purpose. Firstly, data mart contains programs, data, software and hardware of a specific department of a company. There can be separate data marts for finance, sales, production or marketing. All these data marts are different but they can be coordinated. Data mart of one department is different from data mart of another department, and though indexed, this system is not suitable for a huge data base as it is designed to meet the requirements of a particular department.

Data Warehousing is not limited to a particular department and it represents the database of a complete organization. The data stored in data warehouse is more detailed though indexing is light as it has to store huge amounts of information. It is also difficult to manage and takes a long time to process. It implies then that data marts are quick and easy to use, as they make use of small amounts of data. Data warehousing is also more expensive because of the same reason.

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