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by aidenn0 1167 days ago
A data warehouse is a specific use-case for a database.

> Sounds like essentially consolidating data in a database and visualizing it

Yes, and the database in which you consolidate the data is called a "data warehouse" In many cases the sources of data are ... not optimal for querying. (And I mean like "Spread across a dozen excel spreadsheets that people e-mail out new versions of when they make a change" by "not optimal")

1 comments

Consolidating data makes sense and taking it from sources you can't query makes sense, but once you put it into a source you can query, that sounds like a database. I'm not sure why there is a different term here.
The database is often arranged and optimized differently than one used to support operations, and a lot of things are often done to make what would otherwise be long-running, slow queries faster -- e.g., aggregating or otherwise summarizing data likely to be queried in reports. But sure, it's still backed by a database.
We have multiple names at different levels of specificity for things all the time. I have a laptop and a desktop, but they are both "computers"