Exploring the analytical data store

After the ingestion process, the result set is stored in an analytical data store, which can be a relational database (the default in data warehouse solutions) or a standard object store in big data lakes.

It is important to evaluate these two types of storage. Let’s discuss them in detail.

Data warehouse

A data warehouse is a relational database with a predefined schema, designed for data analysis purposes rather than transactional workloads.

Analytics databases are typically denormalized in a scheme in which numeric values are stored in central fact tables, which are linked to one or more dimension tables that represent entities that can be aggregated.

A fact table can, for example, contain sales order data that can be grouped by customer, product, store, and time (allowing you, for example, to easily find the total monthly sales revenue per product for each store).

The star schema is a type of fact and dimension table...