The difference is instead of transactional processing the end-goal with any data warehouse is end-to-end analytics. Cloud data warehouses consolidate data from multiple sources making it accessible for analysis. Whether the data comes externally from a marketing initiative like Facebook ads or internally from a customer database, the information is all consolidated into the single cloud data warehouse, enabling fast querying across all data sources.

 

What really differentiates a cloud data warehouse from a database is its “translation capabilities”, these make it possible for any user to navigate through the data. This enables the translation of raw data into business language to allow business users to fully comprehend the various sets of tables and views.