How is a data warehouse different from a normal database?
Every company conducting business inputs valuable information into transactional-oriented data stores. The distinguishing traits of these online transaction processing (OLTP) databases are that they handle very detailed, day-to-day segments of data, are very write-intensive by nature and are designed to maximize data input and throughput while minimizing data contention and resource-intensive data lookups.By contrast, a data warehouse is constructed to manage aggregated, historical data records, is very read-intensive by nature and is oriented to maximize data output. Usually, a data warehouse is fed a daily diet of detailed business data in overnight batch loads with the intricate daily transactions being aggregated into more historical and analytically formatted database objects. Naturally, since a data warehouse is a collection of a business entity’s historical information, it tends to be much larger in terms of size than its OLTP counterpart.
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