Data Warehosue

[pesk30]

Please can someone give me a summary of what a 'data warehouse' is and how it can benefit a company?

[gilf]

Its basically a huge database containing all sorts of information. Normally it would be used off line for reporting purposes i.e. whn you phone a company and they lookup records this would be an online interactive system and not a datawarehouse. how does it benetfit a company, depends on the data, but normally it would involve being able to produce reports on the information such as number of sales of a product, number of customers in a specific area buying this particulat product etc etc.

[pesk30]

Thanks Gilf so If I had masses of data to store a data warehouse would be great (i.e. product data) but I'd still need another application (web publishing/portal maybe) to allow access to that data just like if I wanted to provide access to my staff via a browser and intranet to that data. I wasn't quite sure of what it gave you and what other applications I might have to look at - so thats cleared it up I think - Thanks!