A Data Warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), is a central repository of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. Its primary purpose is to store current and historical data in a structured format optimized for querying, reporting, and Business Intelligence (BI) activities. Data warehouses separate analytical workloads from transactional (OLTP) workloads to avoid impacting operational systems.
Data warehouses emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s to address the limitations of querying operational databases directly for complex analytical reporting:
Traditional data warehouses faced challenges that led to the rise of Data Lakes and Lakehouses:
Modern cloud data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) addressed some of these issues (especially scalability and cost) by leveraging cloud infrastructure and separating storage and compute, but the core focus remained on structured data loaded via batches.
RisingWave, as a Streaming Database, operates differently from a traditional data warehouse but can interact with it in a larger architecture: