What are the four characteristics of a data warehouse? Explain each.

Textbook:

A data warehouse is the central point of data integration for BA, centralizing and consolidating large amounts of data from multiple sources. The rise of the data warehouse began when companies realized they had data coming in from multiple places and they needed a different place to analyze it all. A typical data warehouse has a relational architecture containing mostly structured data that is aggregated and summarized, FIGURE 12-2: CHARACTERISTICS OF A DATA WAREHOUSE includes a data dictionary, and is fed by multiple data sources. A well-designed data warehouse should be flexible so that end users or analysts can "slice and dice" the data any way they choose to extract hidden gems of knowledge. As an example, grocery chains issue loyalty cards to their customers. To analyze shopper trends, a grocery chain sets up a data warehouse fed by POS data (sales data), CRM data (customer data) and ERP data (inventory data). Figure 12-2 lists the key characteristics of a data warehouse as described by William Inmon, the "father of the data warehouse