Data warehouses are repositories that provide access to data for complex analysis and knowledge discovery. They involve extracting, transforming, and loading data from source systems and storing it in a multidimensional database. Online transaction processing (OLTP) is used for traditional database operations like inserts and updates, while online analytical processing (OLAP) enables analysis of complex warehouse data. The goal of data mining is knowledge discovery through predicting, classifying, identifying patterns, or optimizing from stored warehouse data using techniques like classification, clustering, and regression.