Difference between Datamart, Datawarehouse and Deltalake

Sai Prabhanj Turaga
2 min readMay 1, 2024

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Datamart, data warehouse, and Delta Lake are all concepts related to data storage and management, but they serve different purposes and have different characteristics:

Data Warehouse

  • A data warehouse is a central repository of integrated data from one or more disparate sources.
  • It is used for reporting and data analysis
  • Data warehouses are typically designed using dimensional modeling techniques such as star or snowflake schemas.
  • They often involve Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes to gather data from various sources, clean it, and load it into the warehouse.

Data Mart

. A data mart is a subset of a data warehouse that is focused on a specific business area or function.

. Data marts are designed for the use of specific groups or departments within an organization, providing them with easy access to relevant data for their purposes.

. They are often created to address the needs of a particular department or business unit, offering a more tailored and simplified view of the data compared to the entire data warehouse.

Delta Lake

. Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that brings ACID transactions to Apache Spark and big data workloads.

. It provides reliability, performance, and data integrity for big data analytics and machine learning workflows.

. Delta Lake supports data versioning, schema enforcement, and other features that make it suitable for building robust data pipelines and data lakes on top of cloud storage systems like Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage, or Google Cloud Storage.

. It can be used as a storage layer for data warehouses or data marts, providing scalable and reliable storage for analytics workloads.

In summary, while data warehouses and data marts are more focused on storing and managing structured data for reporting and analysis purposes, Delta Lake is a storage layer designed to provide reliability and performance for big data analytics and machine learning workloads, often used in conjunction with data warehouses or data marts.

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