What is the difference between Data Warehousing and Data Marts?

Knowing the difference between data warehousing and data marts can be very confusing at times, especially when you see some people using both interchangeably. Both are referring to the storehouse of data. However, they differ in terms of the type of data that they are meant to house. Data warehousing is a broad central storehouse for all the historical data of a particular organization. Different data belonging to different units and departments of a company are grouped and stored in the data warehousing.

Having a data warehousing for a company will help to make a smooth decision on some matters. Data warehousing is mostly used for bigger organizations and companies. Datamart, on the other hand, is like a subset of data warehousing. It houses data belonging to a specific department in a company. This means every unit, department in an organization or company has its own data mart where necessary data pertaining to the operation of the department is kept.

A data warehouse is known to have a lot of depth. The data that will be placed in the warehouse is usually extracted from a lot of other units. The information is generally checked first before it will be cleansed and finally included in the data warehouse system. Some people may assume that the data mart is the same as this, but there are some differences between the two.

The data mart is part of the data warehouse. It acts as the access layer, which means that this is very helpful in getting the data from the users effectively. Take note that the data that it will get will be specific towards a particular line or team.