Departmental or subject-specific data warehouses - known as “data marts” in the industry - seem to be gaining in popularity. Fueled partly by companies wanting to start small with focused projects in today’s economy, and partly by advances in data warehousing technology improving affordability and deployability, data marts seem to be popping-up everywhere.
In most cases, data mart projects are driven by the head of a business unit or a functional group (like Sales) needing to analyze their own slice of data in order to run their department more efficiently and effectively. The data may come from directly from an operational system or a combination of source systems resulting in what’s called an “independent data mart”, or it may come directly from a larger, enterprise data warehouse in a hub-and-spoke or “dependent data mart” configuration.
In either case today, according to industry analysts, companies are looking for data mart products that provide compelling price-performance and plug-and-play simplicity based on open architectures.
With our Kickfire Data Mart Appliance, we believe we have done just that. By dramatically reducing the cost of high-performance data warehousing with our SQL Chip and ultra-modern column-store database, and by packing our technology in a true appliance, we have been able to achieve the industry’s leading price-performance and very compelling time-to-value.
Furthermore, by leveraging the defacto standard open source database MySQL, our customers are able to design, develop, and deploy their data marts quickly and flexibly with the tools of their choice. In this way, we’re able to provide high-performance, affordable, open data marts to allow businesses to respond to a market opportunity or competitive threat quickly and effectively.