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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Data warehouse

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈdeɪtə ˈwɛrhaʊs/nounCommon term

In software engineering, data warehouse means: A central database built for reporting and analysis that collects historical data from many systems and is designed for large read queries rather than small updates.

In Turkish: veri ambarı

How it is used

Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Azure Synapse are popular cloud examples. Data is loaded through ETL or ELT pipelines and often modeled as a star schema with fact and dimension tables. It is the typical OLAP system, as opposed to OLTP.

Example sentences

  1. Sales data is copied to the data warehouse every night for the morning reports.

  2. Run heavy analytics in the data warehouse, not on the production database.

Common collocations

  • data warehouse
  • load into the data warehouse
  • star schema
  • ETL pipeline
  • cloud data warehouse
  • OLTPOnline transaction processing: database workloads made of many small, fast reads and writes from users, such as placing orders or updating profiles.
  • denormalizationDeliberately storing some data in more than one place, or combining tables, to make reads faster, while accepting more work to keep the copies correct.
  • databaseAn organized store of data, such as users, orders or posts, that a back end can save to, search and update quickly.
  • aggregate functionA SQL function that takes many rows and returns a single value from them, such as COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN or MAX.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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