Data Warehouse
A centralized repository for structured, historical data optimized for analytics and reporting.
Also: DWH
Definition
A data warehouse is a centralized storage system designed for analytical processing (OLAP) rather than transactional operations (OLTP). It aggregates structured data from multiple operational sources, stores it in optimized columnar formats, and supports complex queries across large datasets for business intelligence and reporting. Data warehouses follow schemas like star or snowflake. Modern cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift separate storage and compute for flexible scaling.
Example
“The company's data warehouse consolidates sales transactions from 15 regional databases, allowing analysts to run queries on five years of purchase history to identify seasonal trends in seconds.”
Synonyms
- analytical database
- OLAP database
- enterprise data store
- reporting database
Antonyms / Opposites
- data lake
- OLTP database
- transactional database
Images
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Related Terms
- sql
- etl
- data-lake
- nosql