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Modern Data Warehouse Dictionary

Melissa Coates has put together a glossary of terms for modern data warehousing:

Logical Data Warehouse

A logical data warehouse (LDW) builds upon the traditional DW by providing unified data access to multiple platforms. Conceptually, the logical data warehouse is a view layer that abstractly accesses distributed systems such as relational DBs, NoSQL DBs, data lakes, in-memory data structures, and so forth, consolidating and relating the data in a virtual layer. This availability of data on various platforms adds flexibility to a traditional DW, and speeds up data availability. The tradeoff for this flexibility can be slower performance for user queries, though the full-fledged LDW vendors employ an array of optimization techniques to mitigate performance issues. A logical data warehouse is broader than just data virtualization and distributed processing which can be thought of as enabling technologies. According to Gartner a full-fledged LDW system also involves metadata management, repository management, taxonomy/ontology resolution, auditing & performance services, as well as service level agreement management.

If you’re just getting started with the topic, check this out, as it will probably clear up several concepts.