They must be able to get to files instantly, with zero downtime. Obviously, some technologies are closer to the heart of this than others, and those technologies are our focus here. Databases are built on the foundation of storing, updating and querying data. At the back end, database vendors have included clustering and failover technologies to distribute the work among several machines, at the same time guaranteeing data integrity. This data usually is not dynamic and contains lots of statistical information, so the tools often use complex queries to glean important trends and analysis from it.
Data marts are basically smaller versions of data warehouses.
They can also be built alongside existing data warehouses to solve smaller problems, or at physical locations apart from a central data warehouse, with each data mart pulling the data that's pertinent to its site from the central warehouse. According to a June DBMS market analysis by Gartner Group's Dataquest unit, the overall DBMS market grew 18 percent in 1999, up from about 12 percent growth in 1998 and 6 percent growth in 1997. From this information alone, you can see that data management is becoming more crucial. Actually, several things are happening at once, making this a fairly complicated category of solutions. First, the databases themselves are maturing.