The data warehouse is a historical database, enterprise-wide and centralized, containing data derived from an operational database. The data in the data warehouse is Subject-oriented, Integrated, Usually identified by a timestamp and Nonvolatile, that is, nothing was added or removed. A data warehouse provides a single up-to-date view of the enterprise on one platform.
- Analysis of data and History maintenance. Relies on timely updates to the critical data – for recent data warehouses, as close to real time as needed.
- Eg. Sales data or customer data history maintenance
- Eg. Analysis of sales based on geography and seasons
- Strategic data for organizations
- The operational software and databases are not suited to store strategic data
- Single place of storage
- Most data in large or medium sized organizations are stored in different databases and joining them to get a complete picture is difficult. Datawarehouses help in storing all data in a single system as they are capable to hold large amounts of data.
- Represents a logically consistent store of detailed data available for strategic, tactical and
event driven business decision making. - Supports short, tactical queries that return in seconds, alongside of traditional decision
support.