Data Lakehouse
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A data lakehouse is what you get when a data lake and a data warehouse have a baby. It stores raw data cheaply like a lake but adds the structure and query performance of a warehouse on top. Technologies like Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, and Hudi make this possible. Best of both worlds, or so they claim.
Real Talk
A data lakehouse combines the low-cost, flexible storage of a data lake with the ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and performance optimizations of a data warehouse. It uses open table formats (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi) on object storage to provide warehouse-like features without data duplication. Databricks and similar platforms popularized this architecture.
When You'll Hear This
"The lakehouse lets us run SQL analytics directly on our data lake." / "We switched from a separate lake and warehouse to a unified lakehouse architecture."
Related Terms
Columnar Storage
Columnar storage saves data column by column instead of row by row. All the ages together, all the names together, all the emails together.
Data Lake
A data lake is a massive storage dump where you throw every piece of data in its raw format. CSV files, JSON, images, logs, whatever.
Data Warehouse
A data warehouse is where all your company's data goes to be analyzed.
OLAP
OLAP is all about analyzing huge amounts of data to answer business questions. 'What were total sales by region last quarter?' That's an OLAP query.