IT lexicon Database Data warehouse

Data warehouse

Database På svenska → Updated: 2026-07-28

A central database tuned for analysis rather than transactions — historical data from many source systems, collected and structured.

It differs from an OLTP database on every axis: columnar rather than row storage, reads rather than writes, aggregations over billions of rows rather than single-key lookups. Data arrives via ETL and is usually shaped into a star schema.

Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball formalised the discipline in the 1990s and argued top-down versus bottom-up for decades. Modern incarnations are cloud services: BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake. The competing idea is the lakehouse.

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