Question

Although data warehouses offer substantial benefits, the cost of a data warehouse can be very high, both to build and to maintain; it is difficult and expensive to incorporate data from obsolete legacy systems as well as maybe the cause of a lack of incentive among departments within a company to share data.

1) In your own assessment, what is the alternative to data warehouses and how would respond to small size businesses who want to invest in Data Marts.

2) The advantages of data marts over data warehouses

Answer 1

Answer: ( i ) According to me there are three alternative to data warehouses are following as:

1: Data Lakes

2: HTAP/In-Memory DBMSs

3: OLAP-Style Analysis With Self-Service Tools

Data Lakes: A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. You can store your data as-is, without having to first structure the data, and run different types of analytics—from dashboards and visualizations to big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning to guide better decisions.

HTAP/In-Memory DBMSs: In-memory computing offers another alternative to the data warehouse by allowing for the consolidation of analytical and transactional databases into a single database that can support both online transactional processing (OLTP) and OLAP.This is known as hybrid analytical transactional processing, or HTAP. It differs from data warehousing, because in that strategy the OLTP databases feed the OLAP database, whereas with HTAP the step of loading data into a warehouse for historical analytics is eliminated.

OLAP-Style Analysis With Self-Service Tools: Self-service BI tools use a different technology than traditional OLAP tools supported by data warehouses. In particular, self-service tools use column-store data caches rather than OLAP data cubes.These data caches can be accessed in memory instead of reading from or writing to disk. This allows for much more rapid querying than OLAP data warehouses can support.

how would respond to small size businesses who want to invest in Data Marts.

It is greate idea for those who have small bussiness and want to invest in Data Marts because A data mart is the access layer of a data warehouse that is used to provide users with data. Data marts are often seen as small slices of the data warehouse. Data warehouses typically house enterprise-wide data, and information stored in a data mart usually belongs to a specific department or team.The key objective for data marts is to provide the business user with the data that is most relevant, in the shortest possible amount of time. This allows users to develop and follow a train of thought, without needing to wait long periods for queries to complete. Data marts are designed to meet the demands of a specific group and have a comparatively narrow subject area. However, narrow in focus doesn’t necessarily mean small in size. Data marts may contain millions of records and require gigabytes of storage.

(ii) The advantages of data marts over data warehouses

A data mart is an only subtype of a Data Warehouse. It is designed to meet the need of a certain user group.

It helps to take tactical decisions for the business.

A data mart mostly used in a business division at the department level.

The designing process of Data Mart is easy.

Data marts are easy to use, design and implement as it can only handle small amounts of data.

Dimensional modeling and star schema design employed for optimizing the performance of access layer.