What does data warehousing mean?
In: Technology
Computers are good at storing and retrieving data. There are all sorts of special software, called databases, designed just for that. However, it is usually not a good idea to do a lot of both storing and reading from the same database as one will slow down the other.
Imagine the case of a supermarket. When a customer is checking out, the cashier enters the items bought into the database (by ringing them up). However, there could be people back in the headquarters that are trying to find out information about what is going on in the stores (eg “what is the average number of organic bananas sold in March every year?”). If the computer spends a lot of time running the query, it may slow down the ability of the cashier to ring up customers in the store. Hence, you want to separate those activities.
So, companies use data warehouses to store all the data from different databases so they can search it easily.
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