analytics-dictionary / term / data infrastructure

Data warehouse

A data warehouse is a central database designed for analysis, where data from many systems is stored and modelled.

Written by Reflective Data experts · updated Oct 5, 2026

Unlike operational databases built for running an application, a warehouse is optimised for large queries across history. Common examples are BigQuery, Snowflake and Amazon Redshift.

A warehouse becomes the single place where marketing, product and finance data can be joined, which is what makes reliable reporting and AI possible.

Data lake Data modeling ELT (extract, load, transform)ETL (extract, transform, load)

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is Amazon cloud platform, offering storage, compute and data services such as S3 and Redshift.

oltp.md

OLTP

OLTP (online transaction processing) databases are built to run applications, handling many small reads and writes…

terraform.md

Terraform

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool for defining and managing cloud resources in files.

databricks.md

Databricks

Databricks is a data and AI platform built around the lakehouse approach and Apache Spark.

data-lakehouse.md

Data lakehouse

A data lakehouse combines the low-cost storage of a data lake with the management and query…

semi-structured-data.md

Semi-structured data

Semi-structured data has a flexible shape, like JSON, rather than fixed rows and columns.

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