How it is different from Database?

Usually data warehouse is also a database. The records from multiple data sources (may be some other databases)are collected and
stored in Denormalized manner. It normally stores months or years of data to support historical analysis
What is Denormalization?
Normalization is a database designing technique which makes sure that there will not be any redundant data.

It makes our data more reliable (because there will not be any repeating data. Exiting data will be referred wherever
required)

It makes database management easy.

It reduces the size of database.
Following tables are the part of normalized database.
CityId
1
2
3

CityName
Mumbai
Kolkata
Delhi

CustomerId
1
2
3
4

CustomerName
Sukesh
Rajesh
Mahesh
Ganesh

CityId
1
1
2
1

At the end of the day Normalized database leads to multiple join conditions in select query and thus affects the performance.
For above example query will be Select CustomerId, CustomerName, CityName from TblCustomer inner join TblCity on
TblCustomer.CityId=tblCity.CityId
Note: In real time projects there will be more number of tables involved while joining and every table contains many records.
So the solution is Denormalization. We will design the database with repeating data. We will use rare references (or No references)
among data, in short, we will repeat the same data wherever required. Denormalized version of above example looks like,
CustomerId
1
2
3
4

CustomerName
Sukesh
Rajesh
Mahesh
Ganesh

Data warehouse summarized

What is the purpose of Data Warehouse?

CityName
Mumbai
Mumbai
Kolkata
Mumbai

As you can see, in the above real life example I collect different data from different places like from my bank account,
from the Personal notebook (one maintained by mom containing household expenditure), from investment detail data (stored in
Access database) etc.
Once I have collected all data, I store them in a separate excel sheet in Denormalized fashion.
This new excel sheet (we may refer it as Data warehouse) can be used to make my decisions about my expenses and
incomes.
In simple words,Data ware house make us retrieve calculated data quickly and efficiently (without having too many joins in our
select query).