What is data warehousing?

In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence.[1] DWs are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place[2] that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise.[3] This is beneficial for companies as it enables them to interrogate and draw insights from their data and make decisions.[4]

The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems (such as marketing or sales). The data may pass through an operational data store and may require data cleansing[2] for additional operations to ensure data quality before it is used in the DW for reporting.

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

A centralized repository of data from multiple source systems organized in subject areas typically in 3NF or dimensional data modeling techniques.