infrastructure

Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is an analytical database optimised for querying and reporting on large volumes of structured historical data aggregated from multiple sources including web scraping.

Data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, ClickHouse) are designed for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) — complex aggregations over billions of rows — rather than OLTP (transactional reads and writes). They use columnar storage, which compresses repeated values efficiently and enables fast full-column scans for aggregation queries.

For scraping pipelines, the data warehouse is the analytical destination: cleaned, normalised, and deduplicated scraped records are loaded via batch ETL or streaming (via Kafka/BigQuery Streaming Inserts) into fact and dimension tables. Analysts then query the warehouse with SQL to answer business questions — price trend analysis, competitor monitoring, market share estimation.

BigQuery and Snowflake both support external tables over data lake storage (S3, GCS), allowing semi-structured JSON scraped data to be queried without pre-defining a schema — combining the flexibility of a data lake with the query capability of a warehouse.

Related Terms

A data pipeline is an automated sequence of steps that ingests raw data from a source, transforms it, and delivers it to a destination such as a database, data warehouse, or analytics system.

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)

ETL is a data integration pattern where raw data is Extracted from a source, Transformed into the desired format, and Loaded into a destination system.

A data lake is a centralised storage repository that holds raw scraped data in its native format at any scale, deferring schema definition and transformation to query time.

Structured Data Extraction

Converting free-form HTML into typed JSON records using explicit schemas, producing clean structured output instead of raw markup.

Deduplication is the process of identifying and removing or merging duplicate records in a scraped dataset, ensuring each real-world entity appears exactly once.

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Data Warehouse — Web Scraping Glossary | AlterLab