Data Mart, Data Mining & Data

Warehouse
1. What is a data mart?
- A collection of data and tools focused on a specific business unit or problem
- Size does not distinguish data marts but they tend to be smaller than data warehouses

2. What is data mining?

- A collection of tools and techniques for inductive rather than deductive analyses
- Using sophisticated data mining tools  analysts can explore detailed data and business
transactions to uncover meaningful insights, relationships, trends, or patterns with the
business activity and/or history
- Used to identify hypotheses; traditional queries are used to test hypotheses

3. What is data warehouse?

- An environment (not a single technology) which comprises a data store and multiple
software products, often obtained from different vendors
- Products include tools for data extraction, loading, storage, access, query, and reporting
- Data store is a collection of subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, non-volatile data
that is queried to support management decision-making
- Data stores include immense volumes of information detailing every aspect of a
particular subject (such as customers, suppliers, products, markets, or quality)
- Information drawn from company’s internal operational systems (such as order entry,
sales, accounting, manufacturing, and human resources systems) and from external
sources (such as purchased market research and demographic data)
- Data warehouses are typically assembled to support decision-oriented management
queries
- As frequent and/or sophisticated queries can slow operational systems  data
warehouses are established and maintained apart from production systems
- Cross-indexed and supported by significant computing power, data are refreshed
periodically and do not change with each query or access

4. Why is data warehousing important?

- Provide big paybacks to large companies that were mining their data
- Building and mining large data warehouses  focus on marketing programmes to
identify and quantify risks, and to manage inventories effectively
- Uses of data warehousing technologies can be relatively mundane (e.g. reporting
financial info, tracking data on pdt quality, consolidating travel & entertainment
expenses); paybacks were quicker & easier to achieve than mktg-oriented data mining