A deep dive into data lakes

The volume, velocity, and variety of data have grown exponentially due to "big data" and the widespread adoption of cloud-based tools and technologies. Data lakes, centralized repositories that store structured and unstructured data at scale with minimal processing, have become increasingly important for managing this data. They offer scalable, flexible, and affordable large-scale storage, which is essential for analytics. With the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads, data lakes are preferred as they can handle large volumes of semi-structured and unstructured data. Fivetran now supports data lakes as a destination, with support for structured data lake formats like Delta Lake and Iceberg. These formats enable data lakes to be governed, offering capabilities normally associated with data warehouses such as ACID compliance, schema enforcement, cataloging, governance, security, and SQL-based querying and editing. Fivetran automates data integration and movement, ensuring the reliability and integrity of data syncs, handling schema drift or evolution, and guaranteeing pipeline and network performance through optimization, parallelization, and pipelining.