A data mart is a persistent physical store of operational and aggregated data statistically processed data that supports businesspeople in making decisions based primarily on analyses of past activities and results. A data mart contains a predefined subset of enterprise data organized for rapid analysis and reporting. Data warehousing has come into being because the file structure of the large mainframe core business systems is inimical to information retrieval. The purpose of the data warehouse is to combine core business and data from other sources in a format that facilitates reporting and decision support. In just a few years, data warehouses have evolved from large, centralized data repositories to subject specific, but independent, data marts and now to dependent marts that load data from a central repository of Data Staging files that has previously extracted data from the institution’s operational business systems (e.g., student record, finance and human resource systems, etc.).