The data warehousing market consists of tools, technologies, and methodologies that allow for the construction, usage, management, and maintenance of the hardware and software used for a data warehouse, as well as the actual data itself.

The term Data Warehouse was coined by Bill Inmon in 1990, which he defined in the following way: "A warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-volatile collection of data in support of management's decision making process". He defined the terms in the sentence as follows:

Subject Oriented:

Data that gives information about a particular subject instead of about a company's ongoing operations.

Integrated:

Data that is gathered into the data warehouse from a variety of sources and merged into a coherent whole.

Time-variant:

All data in the data warehouse is identified with a particular time period.

Non-volatile:

Data is stable in a data warehouse. More data is added but data is never removed. This enables management to gain a consistent picture of the business.

This definition remains reasonably accurate almost ten years later. However, a single-subject data warehouse is typically referred to as a data mart, while data warehouses are generally enterprise in scope. Also, data warehouses can be volatile. Due to the large amount of storage required for a data warehouse, (multi-terabyte data warehouses are not uncommon), only a certain number of periods of history are kept in the warehouse. For instance, if three years of data are decided on and loaded into the warehouse, every month the oldest month will be "rolled off" the database, and the newest month added.

A much simpler definition of a data warehouse is "a copy of transaction data specifically structured for query and analysis".