Exploring the sales datamart

In Chapter 9, Performing Advanced Operations with Databases, you were introduced to star schemas. In a few words, a star schema consists of a central table known as the fact table, surrounded by dimension tables. While the fact has indicators of your business, for example, sales in dollars, the dimensions have descriptive information about the attributes of your business such as time, customers, and products.

A star that addresses a specific department's needs or that is built for use by a particular group of users is called a datamart. You could have datamarts focused on customer relationship management, inventory, human resources management, budget, and more. In this chapter, you will load a datamart focused on sales.

Sometimes the term "datamart" is confused with "data warehouse". However, datamarts and data warehouses are not the same.

Note

The main difference between datamarts and data warehouses is that data warehouses address the...