There is nearly six terabytes of disk space used for the tables and indexes and the data warehouse itself is expected to grow to one terabyte in data volume. It consists of a 12-month history of sales and usage data and 36 months of product data. The data warehouse user community will grow to about 2,000 users. Fleet's data warehouse environment was designed for growth and provides timely, effective access for analysis. Data in the warehouse is maintained in a format that provides maximum flexibility, enabling it to be viewed any way required by the user.
All business analysis is done via data marts, which provide customized access to summarized data.
This design enables Fleet to extend the scope of the data warehouse with new data elements, and easily add additional data marts to the middle tier to support new applications. Over time the objective is to add more data marts as other functions come on board. Sometime next year we will add a separate data mart containing consumer risk management information. We also just purchased Advanta's credit card business, for which we'll probably add another data mart. Our Informix-based data warehouse architecture gives us the flexibility to do this.