A data warehouse is a storage of information from the past that allows analysts to analyze information from a variety of sources to draw actionable conclusions. A data warehouse can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Which one you choose depends on your specific business needs and considerations like scalability, cost, resources, control and security.
Data warehouses are created to store large amounts historical data from enterprises and for carrying out in-depth analysis of data for reporting and business intelligence (BI). They can be used to store both relational and non-relational data. They are usually structured, meaning that data is loaded, extracted and transformed (ELT) to meet pre-defined schemas before it is stored. This makes executing queries against them much easier than directly against source systems that are operational.
The traditional warehouses on-premises require expensive hardware and software in order to be hosted. They have a limited storage capacity when compared to the compute power and must constantly delete older data to make room for the latest data. A data warehouse allows you to run queries that are based on historical data that are impossible on operational systems because they only update in real-time.
A cloud-based storage, or managed service, is completely automated and extremely efficient solution. It is ideal for businesses that require the analysis of large quantities of data over the long-term. It is usually a more affordable alternative to on-premise data warehouses, as it doesn’t require you to use oversized servers and also offers a flexible pricing. You can pay according to throughput or hourly use or a set amount of resources.