Today I came across one very interesting question

“Data Warehouse can be only deployed in relation database.”

Above statement is true or false.

If we see it simply without any complication or may be go back 7-8 years it’s answer may be false as I find out after doing research on it

“A data warehouse can be normalized or denormalized. It can be a relational database, multidimensional database, flat file, hierarchical database, object database, etc. Data warehouse data often gets changed. And data warehouses often focus on a specific activity or entity.” Larry Greenfield

The data warehouse is normally (but does not have to be) a relational database. It must be organized to hold information in a structure that best supports not only query and reporting, but also advanced analysis techniques, like data mining. Most data warehouses hold information for at least 1 year and sometimes can reach half century, depending on the business/operations data retention requirement. As a result these databases can become very large.en.wikipedia.org

But I think when we look into the complication of designing and functionality which we are expecting from a data warehouse today and plus the concept which use when designing the data warehouse structure like star scheme, snow flake etc., I think it cannot be done in any other type of database which don’t follow the relation database concept. We may call it multidimensional database or ORDBMS and we may talk about cubes, measures, dimension and so on but from the base it has to follows the relation database.

Let me know if anybody has anything to say about it.