What is a data warehouse?

1. What is a data warehouse?

Hello, my name is Aaren, and welcome to introduction to data warehousing.

2. What you will learn

In this course, we will cover topics such as what is a data warehouse and how it compares to the similar-sounding systems of a data lake and data mart. Next, we will look at data warehouse architectures and properties, including the different layers of a data warehouse. Additionally, we will review data warehouse data modeling, touching on the differences between a fact and dimension tables and the difference between row and column stores. Finally, we will look at data prep and cleaning, including the differences between ETL and ELT and the trade-offs between on-premises and cloud data warehouses. So, let's start with a fundamental question. What is a data warehouse?

3. What is a data warehouse?

A data warehouse is a computer system designed to store and analyze large amounts of data for an organization. Let's add more context to this definition by describing what a data warehouse does.

4. What does a data warehouse do?

A data warehouse gathers data from different areas of an organization, such as Engineering, Legal, or Operations. Then it integrates and stores that data and makes it available for analysis. Similar to how a physical warehouse stores items and goods so that they are available to use later. Data warehouses have been around for a while. What makes a data warehouse valuable enough that an organization will invest time and money in creating one?

5. Why is a data warehouse valuable?

Organizations implement data warehouses to support business intelligence activities, such as deriving key performance indicators. Analysts, Data Citizens, Data Scientists, and anyone else who needs to analyze the organization uses the data from the data warehouse as inputs for their analysis. Their analyses lead to organizational decision-making, with the goal of finding ways to innovate based on insights from their data. To better understand these concepts, let's look at an example.

6. Meet Bravo!

Meet Bravo, a hypothetical publicly traded company that sells fancy home office furniture. Let's explore some common scenarios where its employees might utilize a data warehouse.

7. Common scenarios

Bravo might utilize its data warehouse for product forecasting. Their data warehouse aggregates their historical sales by customer and product, which is needed to forecast future demand. In addition, Bravo has specific regulations and governance it must adhere to as a publicly traded company. Bravo's employees could prepare reports from the data warehouse to provide to auditors. The data warehouse could be used to confirm Bravo's adherence to the rules because the data warehouse is a store of financial transactions and customer information. Finally, through analysis of their sales, Bravo noticed their sales growth is accelerating in Asia. Therefore, HR and Operations might use their production and employee data to prepare for hiring more staff to support their sales growth in Asia.

8. Summary

So, in summary, a data warehouse is a computer system designed to store and analyze large amounts of data for an organization. The warehouse becomes a central repository for clean and organized data for the organization. It does this by gathering data from different areas of an organization, integrating it, storing it, then making it available for analysis. Organizations value data warehouses because they support business intelligence activity and enable analysis and decision-making, fostering data-driven innovation.

9. Let's practice!

Now, let's check what you have learned.

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