data warehouse
DAY-tah WAIR-howss
ˈdeɪtə ˈwɛərhaʊsListen
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Syllable breakdown
Dictionary meaning
a centralized system designed to store, integrate, and analyze large volumes of structured historical data from multiple source systems for business intelligence and reporting; data is modeled in advance (schema-on-write), typically using star or snowflake schemas; enables fast analytical queries across years of data; pioneered by Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball in the 1980s–90s; modern cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) have transformed the space with columnar storage and elastic compute
Examples
- The sales team ran quarterly reports against the data warehouse without impacting the transactional database.
- Migrating to a cloud data warehouse cut query time from hours to seconds.
American: 'WAIR-howss'; British: 'WAIR-howss'. No meaningful difference.
Synonyms: enterprise data warehouse, EDW, analytical database
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