What is a data warehouse?

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The image above is taken from and links to a more detailed poster presented at the 2017 Provost’s Teaching and Learning Symposium. While slightly out of date, it still provides a conceptual overview of the types of data available in the UMBC Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse. The key point is that REX is purpose-built for reporting on and using data from primary IT systems that aren't, because they are more transactional in nature.

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A data warehouse is a system that contains much of the data from the administrative systems transformed into an architecture that is optimized for analysis and reporting.  Although extracting and analyzing data directly from such systems is possible, it is difficult and complex, since administrative computing systems are optimized for collecting and processing data, not for analysis and reporting.

A data warehouse contains current and historical data organized in such as way that relevant data are clustered together for easy access.  The warehouse keeps several copies of the data from various points in time. Data in the warehouse are periodically refreshed with data from the operational databases.

Once a data warehouse has been built, various user-friendly reporting and analysis tools can be used to access it.