A Definition of Data Warehousing By Michael Reed of The data warehousing market consists of tools, technologies, and methodologies that allow for the construction, usage, management, and maintenance of the hardware and software used for a data warehouse, as well as the actual data itself. Surveys indicate Data Warehousing will be the single largest IT initiative after completion of Y2K efforts. Biographies of these two individuals have been provided, since many of the terms discussed in this paper were coined and concepts defined by them. Data that is gathered into the data warehouse from a variety of sources and merged into a coherent whole. Non-volatile Data is stable in a data warehouse.
More data is added but data is never removed.
This enables management to gain a consistent picture of the business. This definition remains reasonably accurate almost ten years later. However, a single-subject data warehouse is typically referred to as a data mart, while data warehouses are generally enterprise in scope. Also, data warehouses can be volatile. Ralph Kimball provided a much simpler definition of a data warehouse.