Data Lake

A data lake is a central data store. Thanks to the scalable architecture, huge amounts of data can be received, processed and stored from any source system — without any loss of information or quality. This can include structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

The data lakes can be used on-premise, in the cloud (e.g. Amazon Web Services — AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud) or be operated in a combination of both. They are based on a so-called schema-on-read principle. This means that there is no defined schema into which the data must be brought before saving. The data is only structured and reformatted later when it is used for data analyses, machine learning models, and other business intelligence (BI) applications.

However, it should be noted that if there is a lack of management, many “clear mountain lakes” can turn into a so-called data swamp. This means that as soon as there is a lack of appropriate data quality and data governance measures, it can prove almost impossible to find individual data sets.

Benefits of a data lake

In the following, we will show you the key benefits of a data lake for companies:

Data lake or data warehouse?

Both a data lake and a Data warehouse is used to store data. For this reason, the two approaches are often confused with each other. However, the tools do not compete with each other, but rather complement each other. For example, if raw data is stored in a data lake and is needed to answer a business question, it can be extracted, purified, converted and used in a data warehouse for subsequent analysis.

Read our blog post Data Warehouse vs Data Lake more about the similarities or differences.

Does a data lake make sense?

A data lake is a central repository for huge amounts of different types and sources of data. It solves the problems of data silos and provides an efficient and scalable storage solution that is often used in combination with analytics applications and business intelligence. The ability to store, transform, and analyze data in its raw format opens up new business opportunities and enables seamless digital transformation within the company. This is the key advantage of a data lake.