In Chapter 9, you were introduced to star schemas. In short, a star schema consists of a central table known as the fact table, surrounded by dimension tables. While the fact has indicators of your business such as sales in dollars, the dimensions have descriptive information for the attributes of your business such as time, customers, and products.
A star that addresses a specific department's needs or that is built for use by a particular group of users is called a datamart. You can have datamarts focused on customer relationship management, inventory, human resources management, budget, and more. In this chapter, you will load a datamart focused on sales.
Sometimes the term datamart is confused with datawarehouse. However, datamarts and datawarehouses are not the same.