Data Warehousing (DW) provides the secure, consolidated, and integrated information repository. It brings together the right information across organisational boundaries to ensure there is a ‘single version of the truth’ and the right trusted information is available at the right time to support effective business intelligence.A significant challenge when designing this type of environment is to ensure that it is flexible and responsive to change.

A data warehouse is not necessarily a single database, we think more in terms of a managed environment that supports both large scale enterprise data warehouse repositories and smaller focused data marts required for specific types of analysis such as data mining, and departmental reporting.