Staging area is the storage of data from disparate source applications prior to it being loaded into downstream Data Warehouse, Data Marts and/or Operational Data Source.

The staging area is fed by data from flat files and RDBM prior to loading the data to an enterprise data warehouse or data marts or operational data stores. The staging area is used to extract data from OLTP systems, cleanse the data and transfer them to the target data warehouse. The staging area plays a vital role in building a data warehouse as the extraction and transformation of data happen here.