Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is a centralized analytical database that stores integrated, modelled, historical data from across an organisation, optimized for the read-heavy query patterns of BI and reporting — an OLAP workload. Data arrives through pipelines, is conformed into a deliberate schema (classically star schemas), and is served to analysts with strong guarantees: consistent definitions, transactions, and predictable performance.

The warehouse’s defining trade-off is structure up front: everything in it was modelled on purpose, which is what makes it trustworthy — and what makes it slower to absorb new, messy, or unstructured data than a data lake. The lakehouse is the current attempt to offer both in one system.

Go deeper: Data Warehouse vs Data Lake vs Lakehouse: A Clear Comparison