It is likely that you have heard of data warehousing but are perhaps unsure on how it works and whether your organization would benefit from utilizing a data warehouse.  The concept of data warehousing is actually fairly simple.  A data warehouse is a unique central repository – a warehouse – for data that an enterprise’s various business systems collect.  Periodically, production data from online business applications and other sources is selectively extracted and organized in the data warehouse for useful analysis and access for reporting.  Stated another way, a data warehouse houses a standardized, consistent, clean and integrated form of data sourced from various operational systems in use in the organization, structured in a way to specifically address an organization’s reporting and analytic requirements.  The resulting data warehouse becomes the main source of information for an organization’s report generation, analysis, and presentation through ad hoc reports, portals, and dashboards.