database
(Or corporate data warehouse, CDW) Any system for storing, retrieving and managing large amounts of data. Data warehouse software often includes sophisticated compression and hashing techniques for fast searches, as well as advanced filtering. A data warehouse is often a relational database containing a recent snapshot of corporate data and optimised for searching. Planners and researchers can use this database without worrying about slowing down day-to-day operations of the production database. The latter can be optimised for transaction processing (inserts and updates).
Compare data mart.
(2007-05-16)