data mart

database A type of data warehouse designed primarily to

address a specific function or department's needs, as opposed

to a data warehouse which is traditionally meant to address

the needs of the organisation from an enterprise perspective.

In addition, a data mart often uses aggregation or

summarisation of the data to enhance query performance.

However, it is important to maintain the ability to access the

underlying base data to enable drill-down analysis as

necessary.

(1998-04-24)