A central repository of structured data, integrated from multiple operational sources, modelled for analytical querying (typically with a star or snowflake schema), and optimised for read-heavy workloads supporting reporting and decision-making.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A university research-analytics data warehouse aggregating CRIS publications, HR employment, and finance grants for institutional dashboards.
Is an instance
A national funder's data warehouse of award spend and outputs.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A raw S3 bucket of files is a data lake, not a data warehouse.
Not an instance
An OLTP transactional database is not a data warehouse.

Editorial commentary

Data warehousing dates to the 1980s and 1990s (Inmon, Kimball) and remains the dominant pattern for organisational reporting. In research-information contexts, a data warehouse may aggregate CRIS, HR, finance, and student-system data to support institutional analytics; OECD and national funders maintain warehouses of research-spend data. Modern cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Synapse) blur the lake/warehouse distinction by combining cheap storage with on-demand SQL compute.

References

Inmon W.H., 'Building the Data Warehouse', Wiley, 4th edition, 2005.
Kimball R., Ross M., 'The Data Warehouse Toolkit', Wiley, 3rd edition, 2013.

Also known as

DW · Enterprise data warehouse

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Data warehouse"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-warehouse" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-warehouse",
  "name": "Data warehouse",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-warehouse",
  "description": "A central repository of structured data, integrated from multiple operational sources, modelled for analytical querying (typically with a star or snowflake schema), and optimised for read-heavy workloads supporting reporting and decision-making.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-warehouse",
  "sameAs": [
    "DW",
    "Enterprise data warehouse"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:21",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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