what is a data warehouse

A data warehouse is a type of data management system that is designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. It is a central repository of integrated data from one or more disparate sources, where current and historical data are stored in one single place that is used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise. Data warehouses are used for business intelligence, reporting, and data analysis to extract and summarize data from operational databases. They are designed to give a long-range view of data over time, making them a primary component of business intelligence. Data warehouses are solely intended to perform queries and analysis and often contain large amounts of historical data. They are beneficial for companies as they enable them to interrogate and draw insights from their data and make decisions. Data warehouses are suited for ad hoc analysis as well as custom reporting. They support ad hoc analysis and custom reporting, such as data pipelines, queries, and business applications. Data warehouses make it possible to quickly and easily analyze business data uploaded from operational systems such as point-of-sale systems, inventory management systems, or marketing or sales databases.