Glossary · Database

Data Warehouse

A centralized repository optimized for analytical queries across large volumes of historical data from multiple sources.

A data warehouse is a system designed for reporting and data analysis, serving as a central repository of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. Unlike operational databases (OLTP) optimized for fast transactional operations, data warehouses (OLAP) are optimized for complex analytical queries across large datasets. They typically use a star or snowflake schema design with fact tables and dimension tables. Modern cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Databricks offer elastic scaling, columnar storage, and separation of storage and compute. Data warehouses enable organizations to analyze historical trends, generate reports, and support data-driven decision-making.

Fig — every answer ships with the tables, rows and SQL behind it.