Discuss: How do data warehouse and data mart technologies support the decision-making
process in an organization?
A Data warehouse is a repository of integrated data that can be used primarily for
organizational decision-making. The data stored in the data warehouse may have come
from many different sources, but by having the data stored in a data warehouse, the
information can be extracted more readily. This makes it much easier and efficient to run
queries, especially when the data has come from multiple sources. Data warehouses are
able to store much more historical data than transactional process-oriented systems and the
data remains unchanged once stored in the warehouse. This additional storage capacity
allows management to different types of data over longer periods of time, leading to better
trend analysis and forecasting (Laudon & Laudon, 2013).
Data Mart is a type of Data Warehouse, which is basically the database repositories
contrived for only single subject or operational domain, like human resource or finance.
The data mart can be used for providing decision support on particular subject areas or to
some particular department. The execution of a data mart reduces time and cost when
compared with a full enterprise data warehouse. In addition, the complexity of an
enterprise data warehouse can be simplified with the help of the data mart by delivering a
part of the data, which has been designed to meet the exact user necessities.
Data warehouses and data marts contain both archived and current data. They can also be
