Store data so that it can be used by a variety of BI and analysis programs. A data warehouse is a type of data management system that is designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. Data warehouses are intended only for querying and analysis and often contain large amounts of historical data. Data in a data warehouse is often derived from a wide variety of sources, such as application log files and transaction applications.
One of the primary functions of a data warehouse is to integrate data from various sources. This can include transactional systems, such as point of sale systems or customer relationship management systems, as well as external data sources, such as market research or social media data. As data warehouses became more efficient, they went from information warehouses compatible with traditional BI platforms to extensive analytics infrastructures that support a wide variety of applications, such as operational analysis and performance management. Although they work very well as current data sources and are often used as such by data warehouses, they do not support queries with a large amount of historical data.
This can include combining data from different transactional systems, such as sales and inventory data, or combining data from different external sources, such as market research and social media data. Data warehouses offer the unique global advantage of allowing organizations to analyze large amounts of varying data and extract significant value from them, as well as to maintain a historical record. This allows easy access to data relevant to a specific topic, as well as the ability to track the data over time.
