What is a Data Warehouse: Basic Architecture

An introduction to Data Warehouse main concepts

Antony Henao
Towards Data Science
7 min readSep 9, 2020

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Photo by Jaehyun Kim on Unsplash

A Data Warehouse is a component where your data is centralized, organized, and structured according to your organization's needs. It is used for data analysis and BI processes.

Data warehouses are not a new concept. In fact, the concept was developed in the late 1980s. But, it evolved over time.

The aim of this post is to explain the main concepts related to Data Warehouses and their use cases. Also, we’ll talk about Data Lakes and how these two components work together.

TL;DR — This post comprises basic information about data lakes and data warehouses. So, if you are familiar with these topics and their basic architecture, this post may not be for you. If that is not your case, please go ahead an enjoy the reading.

Why do you need a Data Warehouse?

In the beginning, there was chaos. At least this is my point of view when I arrived at an organization that was doing data analysis using old spreadsheets and a bunch of CSV files. No one didn’t know where the files would come from. They were just…there.

Inconsistent metrics, unreproducible processes, and a bunch of manual — copy/paste — work was common at that time.

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