A data mart is a structured data repository designed to serve a specific line of business (LOB). A subset of a data warehouse, a data mart contains data tailored for a distinct purpose and is accessible to a specialized set of users. Unlike a data warehouse or other source that stores data from across several departments, a data mart stores data intended for a specific department, like marketing, human resources (HR), or finance. They can be built and managed independently from the larger data warehouse, which can simplify and speed analysis and decision-making for the intended user group.
A data mart works using ETL (extract, transform, load) to pull the relevant data directly from larger data warehouses or operational systems, transform it to fit the structure’s schema and ensure quality, and load it into the data mart. Users access the data through business intelligence (BI) tools or SQL queries, enabling them to perform detailed analysis more quickly than if accessing the data from a larger data source.
