What is the difference between a database and a data warehouse?

As we all know, we will use the tool of database in data analysis. You may have heard of the tool of data warehouse. Database and data warehouse are easily confused. Many people think that databases and data warehouses are the same thing, but in fact they are more than that. Do you know the difference between a database and a data warehouse? Let me introduce the related knowledge of database and data warehouse to you.

Generally speaking, traditional databases are born for storage, while data warehouses are obviously born for analysis. The difference in achieving goals is doomed from the beginning. Traditional database includes adding, deleting and querying, while data warehouse focuses on querying. The main task of traditional database is to perform online transaction processing. Mainly responsible for daily operations. Data warehouse system provides data analysis and decision-making services for users or "knowledge workers", and can organize and provide data in different formats to meet different needs. This system is called on-line analytical processing. This is knowledge about database and data warehouse.

So what is the difference between a data warehouse and a database? First of all, we need to consider the object-oriented of users and systems, the customer-oriented database, the transaction and query processing of users, operators, customers and information technology personnel. Data warehouse is market-oriented and used for data analysis of knowledge workers. From this, we can find that the object orientation of database and data warehouse is different.

Of course, there are great differences in data content between the two. Generally speaking, the database manages the current data. But generally speaking, this kind of data is trivial and difficult to be used for decision-making. The data warehouse system manages a large number of historical data, provides a summary and aggregation mechanism, and stores and manages information at different granularity levels.

In database design, there are also differences between database and data warehouse. The database system adopts entity connection data model and application-oriented database design. The data warehouse system adopts star or snowflake model and subject-oriented database design.

In point of view, the two are also different. The database focuses on the current data within the enterprise or department, and does not involve historical data or data of different units. Data warehouse usually needs different versions of cross-domain database schema.

In terms of access mode, databases and data warehouses are also different. Database system is mainly composed of short atomic transactions, which generally requires concurrency control and recovery mechanism. Access to data warehouse system is mostly read-only.

In this paper, we introduced some knowledge about the difference between database and data warehouse. By understanding this knowledge, you can better distinguish between database and data warehouse, and I hope everyone can master it skillfully in the learning process.