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Can you take a small representative database from any organization and convert it into a data warehouse?

What is the difference between a database and a data warehouse? Take a small representative database from any organization and try to convert it into a data warehouse. What are the visible advantages that you can make out?

Chuck Kelley's Answer:

Your question does not quite fit. A data warehouse is a logical construct which specifies how the data is used that is physically implemented in a database. A database is the physical aspects of your data regardless of whether that data is used for OLTP, OLAP, MDM, etc.

Anne Marie Smith's Answer:

A data warehouse is a computer system designed for archiving and analyzing an organization's historical data, such as sales, salaries or other information from day-to-day operations. It is much more than just a database, since a data warehouse includes tools that are used to take data from existing data sources (databases, flat files, etc.) load that chosen data into the data warehouse, give access to the data for users and perform maintenance on the data warehouse. A database is a collection of records stored in a computer in a systematic way, so that a computer program can use it to perform operations. A database can be designed for transactional work or for decision-making (e.g., a data warehouse database). Most data warehouses combine data from multiple sources from multiple periods of time (spanning several years in many cases), so taking one database from an organization and converting it to a data warehouse is not a practical approach.


Anne Marie Smith is a highly acclaimed author and speaker in the fields of data stewardship, data governance, data warehousing, data modeling and metadata management. She holds a doctorate in Management Information Systems and has taught at LaSalle University. Smith serves on the board of directors of DAMA International and is an expert advisor to DM Review's Ask the Experts. Smith is the director of education at EWSolutions, a GSA schedule partner and systems integrator dedicated to providing companies and government agencies with best-in-class business intelligence solutions using data warehousing, enterprise architecture and managed metadata environment technologies (www.EWSolutions.com). She may be reached directly via email at AMSmith@EWSolutions.com.

Chuck Kelley is an internationally known expert in database and data warehousing technology. He has 30 years of experience in designing and implementing operational/production systems and data warehouses. Kelley has worked in some facet of the design and implementation phase of more than 50 data warehouses and data marts. He also teaches seminars, co-authored four books on data warehousing and has been published in many trade magazines on database technology, data warehousing and enterprise data strategies. He can be contacted at chuckkelley@usa.net.

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