3.1 Database Technology Today’s computing hardware is capable of crunching through huge datasets that were considered impossible a few years back. And data management vendors, such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Teradata, have been responding with more powerful software and hardware. Data management technologies discussed in this chapter are: • Databases store data generated by business apps, sensors, and transaction processing systems (TPS). • Data warehouses integrate data from multiple databases and data silos and organize them for complex analysis, knowledge discovery, and to support decision making. • Data marts are small-scale data warehouses that support a single function or department. Organizations that are unable to invest in data warehousing may start with one or more data marts. • Business intelligence (BI) tools and techniques process data and do statistical analysis for insight and discovery—that is, to discover meaningful relationships in the data, keep informed of real time, gain insight, detect trends, and identify opportunities and risks.