A data warehouse is a system that collects prepared data from multiple sources for reporting and analysis.
Built for analysis
A warehouse receives cleaned, historical data from operational systems and arranges it for dashboards, reports, and business questions. It favors analytical scans over small transactional updates.
A common reporting foundation
Pipelines usually extract records, transform definitions, and load them into modeled tables. Consistent metrics matter as much as storage: revenue and customer counts should mean the same thing across reports.