B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

60 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
SCM System
CRM System
Legacy
System
I
Enterprise Data
Warehouse
ERP System
Internal
Applications
Figure 3.10. — Data oriented integration and message broker
data that is focused on a specific business unit or a line of business.
Since data marts contain limited but focused data, they offer much
faster query processing as compared to data warehouses.
A data mart can be populated directly from operational data sources
using an ETL-based data integration solution as used for data warehouses,
or it can get its data from a data warehouse. Figures 3.11, 3.12 and 3.13
show the different topologies of data marts and data warehouses.
Coexistence of data warehouses and data marts
Several companies implement a combination of data marts and data
warehouses to solve their integration needs (see Figure 3.14). It is not a
bad solution to take the load of warehouses by using data marts as
repositories of specialized data, but a company should not build excess
data marts, as it would require maintaining and building additional data
sources leading to higher costs. Thus, the direct usage of data marts
should be limited and the users should access data directly from
warehouses whenever possible.
3.2.4. Multi-database server
A multi-database server, also known as universal data access server,
provides an abstraction layer to access multiple databases and legacy