Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW)

A data warehouse is generally thought of as a data repository, as defined in the popular model put forth by Bill Inmon, which describes these resources as "time-variant" and "non-volatile." This means that data kept in a data warehouse does not change, and includes historic archived data to support long-term analysis. Although some use the term corporate data warehouse to refer to a data warehouse that is "corporate" in the sense that it serves a corporation or large company, some nonprofits or government groups may also build their own corporate data warehouses. In such cases, the warehouse is "corporate" simply in the sense that it belongs to a monolithic and centralized structure. Corporate data warehouse models are often fed by smaller data warehouse systems, with data and metadata flowing into and out of these massive central data storage setups.