The Value Of Well Built Data Warehouses

For those who are brand-new to the entire idea of business intelligence and the uses of data

warehouses and data marts, the explanations one normally finds can be very confusing and

practically totally incomprehensible. In today's business environment not only does one have to have

a lot of business savvy, they also need to at least have a working understanding of on-line info

storage space and retrieval.

As the majority of business individuals currently know business intelligence is the collecting,analyzing and maintaining of data that effects every level of the business enterprise. However, inorder to put that info to good usage, those who carry out certain jobs within the business ought tohave the ability to retrieve the info they require rapidly. They use the data that is saved in data banksfor this application. Data marts are data banks within an organization that are maintained by the different divisions of theorganization and generally hold data concerning that department. This data is collected from specificsources. These sources might be internal departments, a central data warehouse or externalresources. Every department like finance, sales or advertising would have their very own datamartproject which would consist of data concerning their area of operations. The reason for having these specific data marts for the different divisions makes it easier for everydepartment to analyze the data because it refers only to their department. This makes it quicker andeasier to not only access the data but also in fast choice manufacturing. In today's business world in

order to be competitive, informed choices need to be made on a regular basis in order to discoveranswers to problems or to stay clear of issues. Business intelligence deals with the sorting of the datain these data marts and delivering that data so that it can be used to make the choices needed. Data marts are generally of two kinds, independent and dependent. Independent data marts arestand alone systems that collect their data from functional systems or external sources or both. Thisdata has to be moved from the sources, filtered and then collected in the data mart. Independent datamarts generally can offer answers to issues in a much briefer timeframe. Dependent data marts however, collect their data from centralized data warehouses. This data isgenerally clean and formatted for usage. The dependent data marts have only to recognize thepertinent data and move it into their data bank. Dependent data marts have the benefit of easyaccess to the data for the pertinent department which assists in enhanced performance andavailability and better control and lowered expenses. Data marts assist business intelligence by being able to deliver the essential data about theirdepartment rapidly in a type that makes decision making fast and simple. datamart