Dictionary.net

(Or corporate data warehouse, CDW) Any system forstoring, retrieving and managing large amounts of data. Datawarehouse software often includes sophisticated compressionand hashing techniques for fast searches, as well asadvanced filtering. A data warehouse is often a relationaldatabase containing a recent snapshot of corporate data andoptimised for searching. Planners and researchers can usethis database without worrying about slowing down day-to-dayoperations of the production database. The latter can beoptimised for transaction processing (inserts and updates).Compare data mart.