Putting your data to Work Definition Simply defined, a data warehouse is a collection of data designed to support management decision making. Data warehouses contain a wide variety of data that present a coherent picture of business conditions at a single point in time. Typically, a data warehouse is housed on an enterprise mainframe server. It is a central repository for all or significant parts of the data that an enterprise's numerous business systems collect. Data warehousing describes the process of defining, populating, and using a data warehouse.
Data warehousing emphasizes the capture of data from diverse sources for useful analysis and access.
Data from various transaction processing applications and other sources is selectively extracted and organized on the data warehouse database for use by analytical applications and user queries. Then, this high quality data is loaded onto the data warehouse database. Such business intelligence permits an enterprise to discover what is going on and what is needed to improve. Learning to systemize business processes that are effective means a better bottom line and profitability. Data warehousing is a journey, not a destination because it initially must be developed and then maintained as a system over time.