BusinessObjects™ XI Release 2 for Dummies®

Chapter 19. Working with Data Marts

In This Chapter

• Getting smart about data marts

• Speeding up with BusinessObjects Rapid Marts

Back in the good old days, the first data warehouses (the ancestors of today’s data marts) were heralded as a wonder solution, set to usher in a glorious new age in which everyone in an enterprise would have all the data they could ever need right at their fingertips — and all at exactly the same time, thus ensuring that a company’s whole workforce would all be on the same page . . . and all would be well in the world.

Well, as we know, it didn’t quite work out like that!

A data mart is a specialized kind of data warehouse that’s been around since at least the 1980s. However, in the current business environment — where having credible and trustworthy data has moved beyond being an operational advantage to become a legislative requirement for many — the improved data quality that data marts help provide is more relevant today than ever before.

This chapter takes a brief look at how data marts fit into your BusinessObjects system — and how they enable you to ensure that you always have the most accurate, up-to-date and auditable information available.

Choosing Between a Data Warehouse and a Data Mart

In truth, data warehouses are good to have: Everyone having access to the same data — all of it as accurate and up-to-date as possible — can only be a good thing, right?

In practice, data warehouses had a tendency to become somewhat unwieldy behemoths, packed so full ...