The term "data warehouse" is commonly used to define two different things:

1. The database where all business data for a wide swath of a company's operational groups relevant to reporting and analytics lands.

2. A specific type of database appliance/platform that is optimized for holding the type of data described above, which product is typically multi-node and often based around columnar storage of data. More recently these also emphasize ingesting or providing transparent access to to unstructured data (typically with functionality to push down queries to big data stores or other external data sources).

The first is an observation about use cases and is agnostic to technology. The second is a specific type of product that fills the use case of large instances of the first.

That's a good perspective on it, thanks. I'm absolutely guilty of seeing the term it through the lens of the technical solution rather than the problem class.