How’s that data lake?
What’s a data lake
A “data lake” is a single data store that ideally holds all of an enterprise’s data. The benefit of a lake architecture is that you can safely and easily access your data from many end-points such as dashboards, user-facing applications, or even your CRM. Ed Dumbill has a good overview in Forbes here.
If you’ve never been able to use all your data together before—and most companies have not—then a data lake is a huge improvement. So the idea is popular.
I don’t love data lakes
I don’t love data lakes for three reasons:
- They leave thorny questions like “reuse”, and “validity” to individual application implementers, rather than providing an architecturally consistent framework to address those problems—and that means that too often they are dumping grounds for data. Sure, everything ends up there, and if you’re willing to take the time to pick through it, you...