What is actually ... a data warehouse?

The data warehouse (DWH) is a central form of storage parallel to the operational data warehouses. The aim of using data warehouse systems is to give a company an overview of its data and make it analyzable. Data that is managed in the data warehouse is primarily data that is relevant to the company's operations and must be stored for the long term (e.g. customer data and payment transactions) and that serves as the basis for reports, statistics and key figures. This usually involves transactional data and its media data, which places high demands on ITIL processes (ITIL = Information Technology Infrastructure Library - also known as IT Service Management). The DWH is usually preceded by complex data modeling and business object definition. In German-language literature, the term "data warehouse" is also used in connection with the DWH.

A data management platform (DMP), on the other hand, meets the marketing objective of using current data from user behaviour (via streaming) for a pseudonymized approach and keeping the time lag between observation and use of this observation in the seconds or minutes range. This also includes the task of expanding reach with prediction and 3rd party data. The DMP is therefore about pseudonymization, flexibility and up-to-dateness of the data (e.g. purchase intent) when delivering campaigns. In order to achieve this, a slight loss of data is accepted in favor of time and quantity throughput with generic data models. In the same way, the data retention relevant for communication is limited in terms of time.

Term explained by: Annette DielmannChief Product Officer at Goldbach Digital Services.