Data Warehousing

A data warehouse is an efficient way to bring together large bodies of data. A data warehouse:

• Pools information from multiple databases
• Updates its contents at regular intervals
• Creates data marts, or subsets of information
• Requires specialized data mining software to take full advantage of its capabilities

A data warehouse is used to collect and combine data from other databases. It updates this data on a regular basis, depending on a company's information needs. Some knowledge workers will only need a portion of this large amount of information. In this case a subset of information, called a data mart, can be created that contains only the needed data.