What is a data lake?

Data lakes serve as central destinations for business data and offer users a platform to guide business decisions. Unlike data warehouses and data marts that require structured data, data lakes can accommodate large volumes of both raw, unstructured data and structured, relational data. They are popular for use cases such as storing huge volumes of data before modeling it and loading it to a data warehouse or serving as specialized destinations for specific AI/ML applications. However, without proper data governance, data lakes can become "murky" and difficult to navigate. New technologies like AWS Lake Formation and Databricks Data Lakehouse are combining characteristics of both data warehouses and data lakes to make data less murky. Single sources of truth such as data warehouses and data lakes will continue to form the foundation of modern data stacks, enabling analytics through data integration.