- Data warehousing aims to help knowledge workers make better decisions by integrating data from multiple sources and providing historical and aggregated data views. It separates analytical processing from operational processing for improved performance.
- A data warehouse contains subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and non-volatile data to support analysis. It is maintained separately from operational databases. Common schemas include star schemas and snowflake schemas.
- Online analytical processing (OLAP) supports ad-hoc querying of data warehouses for analysis. It uses multidimensional views of aggregated measures and dimensions. Relational and multidimensional OLAP are common architectures. Measures are metrics like sales, and dimensions provide context like products and time periods.