What is a “data warehouse”?
A data warehouse stores current and historical data for the entire company. We show you what it can do beyond that and what its advantages and disadvantages are.
The term “data warehouse” refers to a type of data management system that is used to enable and support business intelligence activities (especially the execution of queries and analyses). Data warehouses often contain large amounts of historical data.
A data warehouse centralizes and consolidates large amounts of data from various sources, such as application log files and transactional applications. Here, for example, you can see all the databases that centron ccloud³ supports. Its analytics capabilities help companies derive valuable business insights from their data to improve decision making. Over time, a historical data set is created that can be of tremendous value.
Elements of a typical data warehouse
- relational database (for storage and management of data)
- Extraction, loading and transformation solution (to prepare the data for analysis).
- Statistical analysis, reporting and data mining capabilities
- Client analysis tools (for visualization and presentation of data)
- More sophisticated analytic applications that generate actionable information (through algorithms or artificial intelligence) or enable further data analysis (through graphical or spatial functions)
Pros and cons of a data warehouse
➕ Delivers advanced business intelligence
➕ ensures data quality and consistency
➕ saves time and money
➕ enables tracking of historical data
➕ provides higher return on investment (ROI)
➖ requires additional reporting
➖ May limit flexibility in handling data
➖ May lead to data privacy concerns
➖ May cause high implementation costs
Sources: Oracle & CIO
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