A Typical Data Warehouse & It's Architecture

Today Let's see what a Data Warehouse is,

In general terms 'Warehouse' means a large place/building/house where goods are stored 

before they are distributed.

Similarly a 'Data Warehouse' is nothing but a large database where data is stored before it is

used/distributed for some analytic purpose. 

Data stored in a data warehouse is many a times referred as raw-data which could be

structured/unstructured. To simplify it further, a data warehouse is a database designed for 

querying, reporting and analyzing certain information.

Data Warehouse mostly contains historical data derived from transaction data. 

A typical data warehouse separates transactional and analytic workload. 

Data Warehouse is primarily an analytic's tool.

A typical Data Warehouse Architecture Diagram

Now lets see what a Data Warehouse with Staging Area means, in the previous diagram whatever data is put in to the data warehouse is assumed to be clean and already processed, but most of the data warehouses happen to have a staging area implemented where data cleansing and processing is done before the data is put into a data warehouse. Staging areas are used for performing operations that affect production query environment. This is many a times accomplished by using ETL(Extract-Transform-Load) tools.

Data Warehouse with Staging Area Architecture Diagram

We may require to customize our data warehouse for different group of users. This may be achieved by adding data-marts to our data warehouse, Data marts are nothing but databases/systems designed for a certain group of users/groups/businesses.

Data Warehouse with Data Marts Architecture Diagram