A data warehouse is where you can store the historical information of an organization, allowing analysts to examine a variety of sources of data to get actionable information. A data warehouse can be deployed on the premises or in a cloud. The choice you make will depend on your business requirements and other aspects such as scalability cost, resources, control and security.
Data warehouses are made for storing large amounts of historical enterprise data as well as performing in-depth analysis of data for business intelligence and reporting (BI). They can store relational and nonrelational information. They are typically structured, which means that the data is loaded and extracted before being transformed in order to conform to the predefined schemas before being stored. This makes it simpler to run queries against them instead of directly against an operational source system.
The traditional warehouses on-premises require expensive equipment and software to be hosted. They have a limited storage capacity compared to the compute power and have to constantly discard old data to make space for the newest data. A data warehouse allows you to run historic queries that aren’t possible on operational systems since they only update in real-time.
A cloud-based data warehouse or managed service, is a fully automated and highly efficient solution that is a perfect fit for organizations that need to analyze huge amounts of data over the course of. It is often a better alternative to data warehouses on premises because it eliminates the need for large servers and also provides flexible pricing, with the option of paying per hour of usage or with a fixed price for a predetermined amount of resources.
