A data warehouse is a type of data management system that is designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. It is a central repository of integrated data from one or more disparate sources, where current and historical data are stored in one single place that is used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise. Data warehouses are solely intended to perform queries and analysis and often contain large amounts of historical data.

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 typical data warehouse often includes the following elements:

• Analytical database
• Critical analytical components and procedures
• Ad hoc analysis and custom reporting, such as data pipelines, queries, and business applications
• Consolidation and integration of massive amounts of current and historical data in one place

Data warehouses are suited for ad hoc analysis as well as custom reporting. They are used to support data analysis, data mining, and decision-making. Data warehouses are also used to extract insights from data, monitor business performance, and support decision-making.

A data warehouse may contain multiple databases, and within each database, data is organized into tables and columns. Tables can be organized inside of schemas, which can be thought of as folders. When data is ingested, it is stored in various tables described by the schema. Query tools use the schema to determine which data tables to access and analyze.

In summary, a data warehouse is a central repository of integrated data from one or more disparate sources, where current and historical data are stored in one single place that is used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise. It is designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics, and is solely intended to perform queries and analysis.