What is a data warehouse and how are they used?

Context: In computing, a data warehouse, also known as an enterprise data warehouse, is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise. This is beneficial for companies as it enables them to interrogate and draw insights from their data and make decisions.

The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems. The data may pass through an operational data store and may require data cleansing for additional operations to ensure data quality before it is used in the DW for reporting.

Extract, transform, load and extract, load, transform are the two main approaches used to build a data warehouse system.

Answer: Data warehouses are systems which store current and historical information in a single place and are designed to perform reporting and data analysis. There are two main patterns to process data in a data warehouse: Extract, transform, load (ETL) and Extract Load and Transform (ELT)