Chapter SeventeenData Mart Maintenance

Now that the data marts are set up, they will need ongoing maintenance to get the most out of your data. The first step is to establish a mart lead per mart who will be responsible for carrying out the maintenance tasks for each mart:

  • Educate team.
  • Identify issues.
  • Identify new needs.

Mart leads are ideally part of the business unit that needs the mart. They know the context for the data; if Facebook ads spike in their conversion rate, they should be the ones who'd know “that's because we just cut our spend in half and removed the nonperforming ads.” They can communicate with the warehouse lead about their teams’ data needs and then communicate and educate the team about using their mart.

They are responsible for identifying issues in the data that exist in their mart. They also should be the ones creating requests to get more data sources or tables added to their mart. They also should be part of the workflow/ticket system and be able to teach others and maybe even respond themselves to tickets/data requests.

Educate Team

Different teams have different needs, but some common threads include teaching SQL skills or how to use your BI tool. We wrote a book on how to teach SQL to help with explaining how JOINs, aggregations, and subqueries work. These concepts are not intuitive to most business users; however, they can be taught in a relatively short time frame.

Mart leads should document and share data quirks that show up in common queries. ...

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