Distributing Data to Data Marts
Your data warehouse design may include data marts for specific business areas such as sales, warehouse, and financial departments. Each such data mart contains a subset of the data warehouse data, but it should use common shared dimensions to prevent inconsistencies in analysis and reporting. For example, a Products dimension table may be used in all data marts, but a financial business planning dimension table may only be appropriate for financial data marts. Other data marts may contain region-specific data to augment region-specific operational database systems.
The initial load of a data mart from the data warehouse copies all applicable shared dimension tables and the fact data appropriate to the data mart. Special dimension tables unique to a data mart may be created locally if they are to be used only within the department or group served by the data mart; dimensions that are used to create reports for comparison to reports from other data marts should be shared dimensions that are administered centrally at the data warehouse and loaded from data warehouse tables. You can use many or all of the same tools to load data marts that you use to load the data warehouse database.