DATA WAREHOUSE

A?data warehouse?is a type of?data management?system that is designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. Data warehouses are solely intended to perform queries and analysis and often contain large amounts of historical data. The data within a data warehouse is usually derived from a wide range of sources such as application log files and transaction applications.

A data warehouse centralizes and consolidates large amounts of data from multiple sources. Its analytical capabilities allow organizations to derive valuable business insights from their data to improve decision-making. Over time, it builds a historical record that can be invaluable to data scientists and business analysts. Because of these capabilities, a data warehouse can be considered an organization’s “single source of truth.”

A well-designed data warehouse will perform queries very quickly, deliver high data throughput, and provide enough flexibility for end users to “slice and dice” or reduce the volume of data for closer examination to meet a variety of demands—whether at a high level or at a very fine, detailed level. The data warehouse serves as the functional foundation for middleware BI environments that provide end users with reports, dashboards, and other interfaces.

A?data warehouse is a large collection of business data used to help an organization make decisions.?The concept of the data warehouse has existed since the 1980s, when it was developed to help transition data from merely powering operations to fueling decision support systems that reveal?business intelligence. The large amount of data in data warehouses comes from different places such as internal applications such as marketing, sales, and finance; customer-facing apps; and external partner systems, among others.

On a technical level, a?data warehouse?periodically pulls data from those apps and systems; then, the data goes through formatting and import processes to match the data already in the warehouse. The data warehouse stores this processed data so it’s ready for decision makers to access. How frequently data pulls occur, or how data is formatted, etc., will vary depending on the needs of the organization.

Benefits of a Data Warehouse

Data warehouses offer the overarching and unique benefit of allowing organizations to analyze large amounts of variant data and extract significant value from it, as well as to keep a historical record.

Four unique characteristics (described by computer scientist William Inmon, who is considered the father of the data warehouse) allow data warehouses to deliver this overarching benefit. According to this definition, data warehouses are

• Subject-oriented.?They can analyze data about a particular subject or functional area (such as sales).
• Integrated.?Data warehouses create consistency among different data types from disparate sources.
• Nonvolatile.?Once data is in a data warehouse, it’s stable and doesn’t change.
• Time-variant.?Data warehouse analysis looks at change over time.