Role of Data Marts in Data Management

Data marts are repositories of data collected from a database which may further serve the purpose of a definite interest or a certain group. In software product development, the data mart helps in meeting specific demands from a group of users in terms of content, analysis, access and overall presentation. Although, the term data mart is analogous to data warehousing, there are certain differences. A data warehouse is a strategic concept, whereas a data mart is a tactical approach that meets an immediate need. Data marts are based on the analysis of users need, whereas, data warehouses are based on the need to store the existing data.

Data marts have various advantages. These are mainly as follows:

• Easy access to frequently used data
  
• Creation of collective view for a group of users
  
• Improvement in response-time from end-users
  
• Flexible and easy way of creation
  
• More cost-effective than a Data warehouse
  
• User definitions are clearer than a Data warehouse.

Any organization can have multiple data marts with each one focusing on specific business needs of a certain department or a group of users. Also, the data marts may relate only when the resources shared or the design methodologies are dependent on one another. In practice, such as in an online software development process, each owner group uses its own resources including the data, hardware and software. This enables each group to use and deploy their data independently without any involvement of other data marts.

The steps to design a data mart are as follows:

• Study to determine the scope of the data mart and requirement analysis
  
• Define the technical and business requirements for the data mart
  
• Develop the physical and logical design of the data mart
  
• Implementation and check workability

Data marts have certain disadvantages as well. Data marts cannot completely judge the performance of LAN-based database management systems while porting from one environment to another. Also, the data mart can support small user groups or simple data sources, which are not ideal for distributed application software and development of large-scale enterprise-wide database management systems.