Data mart and Data warehouse..?

Question

I know it might seem a silly question..

What exactly are Data warehouse and Data mart?

What's the differense between them?

And what's the purpose of each one?

And also how does each one of them work?

Answer 1

A data warehouse is just what the name suggests - a warehouse of data. In practice, this typically consists of a number of database servers designed primarily for long-term storage of large volumes of business data. Just as businesses have warehouses to store their goods, many also have such huge volumes of data that they must build a virtual warehouse to store all that data in a single, consistent place.

Data warehouses are very generalized. That is, they contain many different kinds of information in many different formats, stored in the widest method possible (so that the data can easily be retrieved, grouped and analyzed from any number of different aspects)

A data mart is more specialized - think of it as one of those aspects described just above. If you have a data warehouse and you need to set up a specific schema for retrieving some of that data in a particular format, you set up a data mart, which formats and serves the data to whatever application(s) require it.