Overview
Cloud data warehouses (e.g., Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Snowflake) are designed for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing). They store massive amounts of structured data and allow users to run complex SQL queries across petabytes of information.
Key Features
- Columnar Storage: Optimized for reading large amounts of data from specific columns.
- Massively Parallel Processing (MPP): Distributes queries across a cluster of nodes for extreme speed.
- Separation of Storage and Compute: Allows you to scale storage and processing power independently.
- Integration: Connects with BI tools like Tableau, Looker, and Power BI.
Use Cases
- Historical data analysis.
- Business intelligence and reporting.
- Large-scale data mining.