A data warehouse is a central repository of information that can be analyzed to make more informed decisions. Data flows into a data warehouse from transactional systems, relational databases, and other sources, typically on a regular cadence. Business analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and decision-makers access the data through business intelligence (BI) tools, SQL clients, and other analytics applications.
The benefits of a data warehouse include the following:
- Informed decision making
- Consolidated data from many sources
- Historical data analysis
- Data quality, consistency, and accuracy
- Separation of analytics processing from transactional databases, which improves the performance of both systems