Database versus Data Warehouse

Data warehouse technology includes a set of concepts and methods that offer the users useful information for decision making. The necessity to build a data warehouse arises from the necessity to improve the quality of information in the organization. The date proceeding from different sources, having a variety of forms - both structured and unstructured, are filtered according to business rules and are integrated in a single large data collection. Using informatics solutions, managers have understood that data stored in operational systems - including databases, are an informational gold mine that must be exploited. Data warehouses have been developed to answer the increasing demands for complex analysis, which could not be properly achieved with operational databases. The present paper emphasizes some of the criteria that information application developers can use in order to choose between a database solution or a data warehouse one