I would like to know whether the content of the 'Data mart' tables be
modified by the Marketing applications.
I understand that the 'Data mart' is filled by the ETL layer by
extracting and transforming the data from the Data warehouse(for
'Dependent datamart' case).
After it is filled, does the Marketing application have the option of
only 'read'/'query'ing the data from the 'Data mart'? In our usecase,
there is a specific case where the applications need to write some
minor data occasionally into the Data mart (into the existing tables,
not in any new tables). Is that Technically feasible with the 'Oracle
Data mart'?

Op 12-3-2010 14:34, guser78 schreef:
Sure, why not? As long as you realize that all changes may be lost when
a new ETL process has run.

Shakespeare

On Mar 12, 10:01*am, Shakespeare <what... (AT) xs4all (DOT) nl> wrote:
I think part of the answer here might depend on exactly what kind of
updates are bieing talked about. As I understand it a 'real' datamrat
is an extraction of a subset of data from a data warehouse for a
specialized use. You would normally expect a datamart to be
completely refreshed from a source data warehouse every N periods of
time in which case your changes would be lost. However, it is normal
to process the datamart data to perform summaries, aggregations, and
produce specialized reports. Such processing would need to be redone
with every refresh of the data anyway and is hopefully not what the OP
is asking about.

If the customer wants to apply real changes to the data that does not
fall into what would be considered normal datamart processing then
either the changes would need to be propogated back to the source
warehouse or a means would need to exist to allow reapplication of the
changes after every refresh. If you are in this situation then the
possibility exists the customer does not properly understand the
datamart concpet, the warehouse is lacking necessary information and
it should really be added there, or the datamart has been butchered
into being another data warehouse. This last can happen due to
company polotics and/or a lack of a lack of knowledge on the part of
the developers on the total system data flow: source to warehouse to
datamart that should be in effect.

What I am suggesting is if you are unsure of applying changes to the
datamark you may want to review the data in the datamark itself, check
into the source feeds, undate frequencey, and ask about the history of
the datamart so that you can put the changes into perspective. Then
you can determine how feasible the requested changes are and if the
changes really need to be in the source warehouse or even earlier in
the data creation stream.

HTH -- Mark D Powell --

On Mar 14, 3:16*am, Mark D Powell <Mark.Powe... (AT) hp (DOT) com> wrote:
Excellent! I can't expect a better reply than this. Thanks!

So, now I understand that I will have to change the ETL layer to the
'Data mart' dynamically.

Majority of the requests will be 'read' requests and can be fulfilled
by reading the data attributes from the Data mart. The Admin 'write'
requests which can come during run time, should be able to adapt the
ETL layer (layer between 'Data warehouse' and 'Data mart'). I guess,
we need to write an additional software module (for e.g. JDBC) to
interpret 'Admin write' requests and adapt the ETL layer accordingly.

Does that sound a reasonable approach?