Information warehousing and reservoirs is an evolving concept as the information management industry matures toward new types of data and technologies to process them. Information warehousing deals with all the data repositories in the reference architecture including the following:

§  Data warehouses
The system of record or enterprise data warehouse repository

§  Data marts
Specific to the function (e.g., sales data mart repository) or departmental data mart repository (e.g., finance data mart). The data can be retained for multiple years for business users to perform time series analysis.

§  Operational data stores
ODS serve as repository for all operational data needs. The data are usually retained for a period of three to six months as operational data needs are usually recent data.

§  Master data stores
Serve as a repository for key master data entities such as product, customer, suppliers, and so forth. Enterprises also invest in reference data stores for storing commonly used reference data such as currency codes, country codes, and so forth.

§  Content stores
Serve as a repository for all enterprise content such as contractual documents, policy documents, e-mails, and so forth. Content stores serve as a repository for unstructured content.

§  Data lakes/data exploration zones
A relatively new concept with the advent of big data solutions, data lakes are a collection of repositories for both structured and unstructured data and serve as data exploration zones for running algorithms and data visualization for insights into enterprise data.