Data Warehouse
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A data warehouse is where all your company's data goes to be analyzed. It collects data from every source, sales, marketing, support, and organizes it for reporting. You don't run your app against it; you run your dashboards and analytics. It's optimized for 'give me all the numbers' not 'save this user's email.'
Real Talk
A data warehouse is a central repository optimized for analytical queries across large historical datasets from multiple sources. It uses schemas designed for aggregation and reporting (star/snowflake schemas), columnar storage for efficient analytical queries, and is typically loaded through ETL/ELT pipelines. Examples include Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and ClickHouse.
When You'll Hear This
"Our data warehouse joins sales, marketing, and support data for executive dashboards." / "Don't run analytics on the production database, that's what the warehouse is for."
Related Terms
Data Lake
A data lake is a massive storage dump where you throw every piece of data in its raw format. CSV files, JSON, images, logs, whatever.
Data Lakehouse
A data lakehouse is what you get when a data lake and a data warehouse have a baby.
ETL
ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load. You extract data from sources, transform it (clean, reshape, calculate), then load it into your warehouse.
Star Schema
A star schema organizes your warehouse like a star.