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data warehouse

A large store of data for analysis. Organizations use data warehouses (and smaller 'data marts') to help them analyze historic transaction data to detect useful patterns and trends. First of all the data is transferred into the data warehouse using a process called extracting, transforming and loading (ETL). Then it is organized and stored in the data warehouse in ways that optimize it for high-performance analysis. The transfer to a separate data warehouse system, which is usually performed as a regular batch job every night or at some other interval, insulates the live transaction systems from any side-effects of the analysis, but at the cost of not having the very latest data included in the analysis.

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