Glossary

What is a data warehouse?

A data warehouse is a specialized data management system designed to enable and support analytics for business teams and executives to help them understand business and market conditions, and to enable them to make effective business decisions based on available data. A data warehouse most typically is built upon a relational database management system (RDBMS) and can be queried as part of the process of business analysis. It often has large amounts of historical data.

A data warehouse receives data from business systems such as ERP, CRM, supply chain applications, operational databases, and other sources on a regular basis. That data can be accessed through business intelligence (BI) tools, SQL clients, dashboards, and other analytics applications.

Despite the fact that data warehouses have been used for decades, data warehouses are a still relevant solution for modern analytics, despite numerous new options such as data lakes and NoSQL databases.