The Data Warehouse Center can store data in any DB2 database, including DB2 Universal Database for AS/400 and DB2 Universal Database for OS/390, as well as in flat files. It can also populate a variety of databases using DB2 DataJoiner®, IBM's multi-vendor database middleware.

The Data Warehouse Center populates the warehouse tables that comprise the data warehouse by extracting data from one or more warehouse source tables, views, or files, moving the data to the warehouse system, and transforming the data upon insertion into a warehouse table.