Data Warehouse

A Data Warehouse is a centralized repository designed for storing and managing large volumes of structured and semi-structured data from various sources. It supports business intelligence (BI) activities, particularly analytics and reporting. Data warehouses facilitate the consolidation of data from multiple databases, allowing organizations to analyze historical and current data to identify trends, make informed decisions, and generate insights. They are characterized by their ability to handle complex queries and aggregate large sets of data efficiently. Data is typically organized in a way that optimizes read access, often using a schema such as star or snowflake to structure data for easy retrieval. This enables users to perform in-depth analyses without affecting the performance of operational systems. Data warehouses are often supplemented by tools for data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) to prepare data for analysis.