what is data warehousing

A database designed to support decision making in an organization. Data from the production databases are copied to the data warehouse so that queries can be performed without disturbing the performance or the stability of the production systems.

 Data warehouses contain a wide variety of data that present a coherent picture of business conditions at a single point in time. The term data warehousing generally refers to the combination of many different databases across an entire enterprise.

Development of a data warehouse includes development of systems to extract data from operating systems plus installation of a warehouse database system that provides managers flexible access to the data.