The main purposes of an atomic data warehouse are to serve as a staging ground for subsets of the atomic warehouse, called data marts, and to serve as a reference data warehouse. The size, central location, and database design of the atomic warehouse may not be suitable to the varied needs of particular groups. These data marts are copied to other computers as data warehouses in their own right.

For example, the Sybase IQ product is designed explicitly for data-warehouse queries and analysis based on a rich set of access methods and storage structures. The same tools that access a traditional database may be even more effective against a Sybase IQ database, because of the improved response time it offers.

The third type of product is a relational database, such as Red Brick Warehouse, optimized for dimensional analysis. While sacrificing some of the flexibility of a standard normalized relational structure, it performs very well on large dimensional databases.

A second type of relational database uses a specialized set of storage and access structures that optimize interactive retrieval (often at the expense of interactive update, which is not central to a data warehouse). For example, bitmaps allow the resolution o

Some topics in this essay:
, Objects Cognos, Sybase IQ, Brick Warehouse, Arbor Essbase, data warehouse, data marts, atomic warehouse, relational database, atomic data warehouse, data warehouses, atomic data, database design, data mart, sybase iq, storage structures,