Data Mart - Dependent Data Mart

According to the Inmon school of data warehousing, a dependent data mart is a logical subset (view) or a physical subset (extract) of a larger data warehouse, isolated for one of the following reasons:

• A need refreshment for a special data model or schema: e.g., to restructure for OLAP
• Performance: to offload the data mart to a separate computer for greater efficiency or to obviate the need to manage that workload on the centralized data warehouse.
• Security: to separate an authorized data subset selectively
• Expediency: to bypass the data governance and authorizations required to incorporate a new application on the Enterprise Data Warehouse
• Proving Ground: to demonstrate the viability and ROI (return on investment) potential of an application prior to migrating it to the Enterprise Data Warehouse
• Politics: a coping strategy for IT (Information Technology) in situations where a user group has more influence than funding or is not a good citizen on the centralized data warehouse.
• Politics: a coping strategy for consumers of data in situations where a data warehouse team is unable to create a usable data warehouse.

According to the Inmon school of data warehousing, tradeoffs inherent with data marts include limited scalability, duplication of data, data inconsistency with other silos of information, and inability to leverage enterprise sources of data.

The alternative school of data warehousing is that of Ralph Kimball. In his view, a data warehouse is nothing more than the union of all the data marts. This view helps to reduce costs and provides fast development, but can create an inconsistent data warehouse, especially in large organizations. Therefore, Kimball's approach is more suitable form small-to-medium corporations.