An Enterprise Data Warehouse encompasses the entire organization-from planning, purchasing, manufacturing, sales and marketing to financial reporting. Because of this complexity, creating an Enterprise Data Warehouse typically requires two to four years of work and millions of dollars to complete.

In contrast, a Data Mart is focused on a single line of business providing the opportunity for a company to build their Data Warehouse in stages as needed. ROI is rapid and a strong foundation is provided for future expansion. Additionally, since a Data Mart relates to a single area, its features are highly focused on the needs of that department. For example, the CornerStar Sales Mart allows for complete views of sales data including shipments, bookings, backlog, forecasts, quotas and revenue adjustments; consolidated world-wide views of sales; unlimited hierarchies for products, customer and salesperson related fields; historical and current view of dimension data like product line and customer type generally associated with detailed sales transactions.