What is a Data Lake?

Introduction to Data Lake

It is a single point storage system that can accommodate relational data of any format from various data sources; this can then be used to produce the data for analytics and reporting purposes. It is not necessary to standardize or structure the data after being picked from the data sources. It can hold standardized or non-standardized, structured or unstructured, processed or unprocessed data from any kind of sources, irrespective of the expected outcomes from the data stored in the Data Lake.

Why do we need a Data Lake?

By building a lake, data scientists can see the unrefined view of data.

Reasons for using it are as follows:

• The corporation that produces business benefits from their data successfully exceed their peers. In an Aberdeen survey, the corporation that set up a Data Lake was 9% above similar companies’ organic revenue growth performance. These leaders were able to perform new types of analytics such as machine learning through new sources such as log files, clickstream data, social media, and Internet connectivity in the lake.
• It supports the importing of data that comes in real-time. Data is gathered from multiple resources and then moved to the lake in the original format. Thus, a lake provides higher scalability of data. Also, you can know what type of data is in the lake by indexing, crawling, cataloging the data.
• It supports Data Governance which manages the availability, usability, security, and integrity of data.
• It can help the Research & Development teams test their hypothesis, refine assumptions, and assess results.
• No silo structure is available.
• It offers customers a 360-degree view and a robust analysis.

The quality of the analysis also increases with the increase in data volume, data quality, and metadata.

• Storage engines such as Hadoop have made it easy to store disparate information. There is no need to model data with a Lake into a company-wide scheme.
• The quality of analyzes also increases with the increase in data volume, data quality, and metadata.
• It offers business agility.
• It is possible to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to make profitable predictions.

Data Lake Architecture on Hadoop, AWS, and Azure

It has two components: storage and calculation. Storage and computing can be either located on-site or in the cloud. This results in the design of a data lake architecture in multiple possible combinations.

1. Hadoop

A distributed server Hadoop cluster solves the big data storage concern. MapReduce is the Hadoop programming model used to divide and process information into smaller subsets in the server cluster.

2. AWS

The AWS product range for its solution is comprehensive. Amazon S3 is at the center of the storage function solution. These Data ingestion tools that allow us to transfer massive amounts of data into S3 are Kinesis Stream, Kinesis Firehose, Snowball, and Direct Connect. In addition to Amazon S3, the NoSQL database, Dynamo DB, and Elastic Search offer a simplified process of querying. AWS offers a large range of products with a steep initial learning curve. However, the comprehensive features of the solution are widely used in commercial intelligence applications.

3. Azure

Micro-soft offered the data lake. The Azure has an analytics and storage layer is called Azure Store (ADLS), and the two components that the analytical layer has Azure Analytics and HDInsight. The ADLS standard was built in HDFS and is storage capable of unlimited. It can save trillions of files larger than a petabyte in size with a single file. Azure Store makes it possible for data to be stored and secured, and scalable in any format.

Benefits

Some important points are given below:

• Provides unlimited data type value.
• Adaptable to changes quickly.
• Long-term ownership costs are reduced.
• Its main advantage is centralizing various sources of content.
• Users from different departments around the world can have flexible data access.
• Provides economical scalability and flexibility.

Risk

• It could lose relevance and momentum after some time.
• There is a greater risk when designing.
• It also increases the cost of storage & products.
• Security and access control is the biggest risk. Sometimes data can be placed in a lake without supervision, as some of the data may need to be protected and regulated.

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This has been a guide to What is a Data Lake? Here we discussed the basic concept, architecture, why do we need it, along with their benefits and risks. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

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