Data Warehousing

A data warehouse is a repository of an organization's electronically stored data. Data warehouses are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis. The data warehouse focuses on data storage and the means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data, and to manage the data dictionary are also considered essential components of a data warehousing system. Data warehousing includes business intelligence tools, tools to extract, transform, and load data into the repository, and tools to manage and retrieve metadata.

Data warehousing arises in an organisation's need for reliable, consolidated, unique and integrated reporting and analysis of its data, at different levels of aggregation.