Datamart vs. reporting Cube, what are the differences?

Question

The terms are used all over the place, and I don\'t know of crisp definitions. I\'m pretty sure I know what a data mart is. And I\'ve created reporting cubes with tools li

Answer 1

Data mart traditionally has meant static data, usually date/time oriented, used by analysts for statistics, budgeting, performance and sales reporting, and other planning activities.

A Cube is an OLAP database that pretty exhaustively converts OLTP data into a static, date/time-oriented schema that uses a query language that is not SQL, but built specifically for answering data mart type questions. It uses terms like measures, dimensions, star-schema, etc. rather than tables, columns, and rows. The best familiar analogy might be pivot-tables in a spreadsheet.