Skip to content
LakeBench
ProblemsCommunityPricing
Sign inStart practicing
Back
  1. Home
  2. Interview prep
  3. What is a data warehouse?

Pipelines & scenarios · Design & Scenarios

What is a data warehouse?

Easypipe-16
data warehouseOLAPBISnowflakeBigQuery

Question

What is a data warehouse in a data engineering context?

Solution

A data warehouse is a centralized analytics store of structured, governed tables optimized for SQL reporting and BI, not for running your app's OLTP transactions.

OLTP apps (Postgres, MySQL)
        |
   ETL / ELT / CDC
        |
Data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Synapse)
        |
   BI tools, analysts, metric layers

Typical traits

  • Columnar storage, MPP or serverless SQL
  • Star/snowflake schemas, facts and dimensions
  • Strong typing, access control, documented marts
  • Separated from production databases so heavy queries do not hurt apps

What you put there

Cleaned historical facts, dimensions, and business marts, not every raw JSON forever (that often lives in a lake first).

Interview tip: "Warehouse = analytics SQL system fed from operational sources." Contrast with OLTP and with a raw data lake.

PreviousNext