Data warehouse
A database built for analysis rather than running an app. It answers big questions across all of a company's data.
What it tells you about a developer
Warehouse experience marks the analytics side of data work: modeling clean tables, writing heavy SQL, and serving dashboards and metrics. A developer who lives in the warehouse is often an analytics engineer, a distinct role from the data engineer who builds the pipelines feeding it. Titles blur the two constantly, so confirm which side the req actually needs.
A data warehouse holds cleaned, organized copies of a company's data so analysts can query all of it with SQL. Regular databases answer many small requests fast, and a warehouse scans billions of rows to answer one big question, like revenue by region by month. Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Databricks dominate the category.