Overview
A good starting-point is the Wikipedia Entry on Data Marts

Question : What are Data Mart Templates ?
Data Marts have a common design of Dimension fields and Facts.

Templates are important because they represent a tremendous Kick-Start approach to the design of Data Marts for a specific business area.
They are produced by exploiting the common design of Dimensions and Facts.

A range of Data Mart diagrams is available in the Case Studies on the Database Answers Web Site.
You can Email us for more information.

Question : How do I improve the performance of my Data Mart ?
Every DBMS produces what is called an Execution Plan for every SELECT statement.

The steps to improving the performance involve checking this Execution Plan against the Indexes that exist, and
making sure that the Query Optimizer has used the appropriate Indexes to obtain the best performance.

This is a specialized area where DBA�s spend a lot of their time when they are looking after production databases
where speed is a mission-critical factor.

Data Marts are always created to support Business Intelligence, which includes Performance Reports, Balanced Scorecards,
Dashboards, Key Performance Indicators and so on.

Best practice always requires user involvement and a generic design to support a flexible approach to meeting changing requirements.
Users will always want changes to their first specifications of their requirements.

The insight that they obtain from the first Reports helps them identify more precisely what their long-term requirements will be.

Therefore flexibility is important.

A well-designed Data Mart will anticipate the areas where flexibility is required.
The design process should always follow two steps :-
�	Production of generic design for the Data Mart
�	Implementation of the design with a specific Data Mart software product.


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