Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A university research-analytics data warehouse aggregating CRIS publications, HR employment, and finance grants for institutional dashboards.
- Is an instance
A national funder's data warehouse of award spend and outputs.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A raw S3 bucket of files is a data lake, not a data warehouse.
- Not an instance
An OLTP transactional database is not a data warehouse.
Editorial commentary
A data warehouse is a central repository of structured data, integrated from multiple operational source systems, modelled for analytical querying (typically a star or snowflake schema) and optimised for read-heavy reporting rather than day-to-day transactions. The pattern dates to Bill Inmon’s and Ralph Kimball’s competing-but-convergent methodologies of the 1980s-90s and remains the dominant approach to organisational reporting today, whether built on-premises or on a modern cloud platform (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Synapse) that blurs the older lake/warehouse distinction by combining cheap storage with on-demand SQL compute.
Scope note: data warehousing is a generic information-systems discipline with its own large, well-established body of practice — this entry is not an attempt to cover that ground, which is best learned from the Inmon/Kimball literature directly. The reason it appears in CASRAI’s dictionary at all is narrow: in a research-administration context, “data warehouse” most often refers to an institutional research-analytics warehouse that aggregates a CRIS, HR, finance, and student-records data — or a national funder’s warehouse of award spend and outputs — for institutional or funder-level analytics and reporting, distinct from any single operational system’s own database.
References
- Inmon W.H., ‘Building the Data Warehouse’, Wiley, 4th edition, 2005.
- Kimball R., Ross M., ‘The Data Warehouse Toolkit’, Wiley, 3rd edition, 2013.
Also known as
DW · Enterprise data warehouse
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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