Data Warehouses and Lakehouses provide analytical storage and compute for large-scale structured and semi-structured data. Core capabilities include columnar storage, massively parallel SQL execution, separation of compute and storage for elastic scaling, managed table formats (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi), materialized views, time-travel queries, streaming ingestion, fine-grained access control, and workload isolation across teams. The category split in the 2020s between classical cloud data warehouses (structured tables, strong schema, proprietary storage) and lakehouses (open table formats on object storage with SQL engines on top); the distinction is increasingly blurred as vendors converge. Leading vendors include Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse/Fabric, ClickHouse, and Firebolt.