What is a Data Warehouse?

What is a data warehouse? well..talking about data warehouse is so interesting these days. Suppose that we have already mastered 'Database itself'. Data ware house looks like giant database that can support some principles for decision making. In Data ware house also contain of what we call Back room and front room.

I just wanna give a sample, one day we well have lunch at "Food restaurant of Institute of Technology Bandung", what should we do is of course we request for the food. we can say the food is data, and int the kitchen we call it staging area where the food is cooked by good chef. when we wanna know about the food that we requested we aren't allowed to get to the kitchen and there is another worker who explain us about the food which is still cooked, in the dining room we can say it's front room.

So, back room is a place for getting source from our system that we can get from such as transactional database or flat files and in this place there is also "staging area" where the place for extracting, cleaning, comforting and delivering ETL that stands for Extract, transform and Load also in this place. and the Front room we can say it's a place for serve our customer when our data is already being the good ones. To know about data warehouse is by practicing with DBMS which offer some future for data mining such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Wanna interesting, just try them .. :)