Going through the process of defining and planning to build a data lake with my team right now.
A data lake is like you said a collection of data stores, and the industry as a whole hasn't defined it very well past that.
IMHO - A (useful) data lake is a platform that can support any type of data store in any format (be it relational, flat, graph, document, etc) and offer a way to consistently query it. A (useful) data lake does much in the way of managing metadata about those data stores that makes it easy to consume.
I have heard these promises of a single query language for different data formats many times and the results (foisted upon developers and customers) have always far more painful than just sticking to SQL.
Plug: We help discover, catalog and search for metadata and lineage in your data lake. We support all major hadoop distros and cloud platforms. Check us out! https://www.waterlinedata.com
Comments
Going through the process of defining and planning to build a data lake with my team right now.
A data lake is like you said a collection of data stores, and the industry as a whole hasn't defined it very well past that.
IMHO - A (useful) data lake is a platform that can support any type of data store in any format (be it relational, flat, graph, document, etc) and offer a way to consistently query it. A (useful) data lake does much in the way of managing metadata about those data stores that makes it easy to consume.
I have heard these promises of a single query language for different data formats many times and the results (foisted upon developers and customers) have always far more painful than just sticking to SQL.
To be fair, most data stores have an SQL layer available, even if it's not optimal
Plug: We help discover, catalog and search for metadata and lineage in your data lake. We support all major hadoop distros and cloud platforms. Check us out! https://www.waterlinedata.com