This is a guest post for Integrate.io written by Bill Inmon, an American computer scientist recognized as the "father of the data warehouse." Inmon wrote the first book and first magazine column about data warehousing, held the first conference about this topic, and was the first person to teach data warehousing classes.

A data warehouse is a centralized storage system for structured data. The data stored here is used for reporting, analytical processing and business intelligence.

Our newest benchmark compares price, performance and differentiated features for Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks and Synapse.

The world is full of different types of goals. Consider football. The goal in football is at the end of the field. A runner either crosses the goal or they don't, when trying to make a touchdown. Or, consider basketball. In basketball, when a player shoots the ball, the player’s shot either goes through the net or it doesn’t. Alternatively, consider ice hockey. When a hockey player shoots the puck, it either goes into the net — or it doesn’t.

The data lakehouse is a promising new technology that combines aspects of data warehouses and data lakes.