What is a data warehouse and what are its main characteristics?

Related questions

1. What is difference between database and data warehouse?
2. What is the difference between data warehouse and OLTP?
3. How are data warehouses created?
4. What is ETL process example?
5. Can Hadoop replace Teradata?
6. What is dimension table in data warehouse?
7. Can star schema have multiple facts?
8. What is data warehouse architecture?
9. Is Hadoop OLTP or OLAP?
10. What is ETL and how it works?

Tags

1. #denormalized
2. #often
3. #historical
4. #retrieve
5. #warehouse
6. #simplification
7. #follows
8. #large
9. #characteristics
10. #amounts
11. #queries
12. #performance
13. #improve