What is the point of a table in a data lake?

Question

I thought the whole point of using a Data Lake versus a Data Warehouse was to invert the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process to LET (Load, Extract, Transform). Doesn't extracting this data, transforming and loading it into a table get us right back where we started?

Answer 1

IMHO the point of a data lake is to store all types of data: unstructured, semi-structured and structured. The Azure version of this is Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) and its primary function is scalable, high-volume storage.

Separately, there is a product Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA). This analytics product can interact with ADLS, but also blob storage, SQL on a VM (IaaS) and the two PaaS database offerings, SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse and HDInsight. It has a powerful batch language called U-SQL, a combination of SQL and .net for interrogating and manipulating these data stores. It also has a database option which, where appropriate, allows you to store data you have processed in table format.

One example might be where you have some unstructured data in your lake, you run your batch output and want to store the structured intermediate output. This is where you might store the output in an ADLA database table. I tend to use them where I can prove I can get a performance improvement out of them and/or want to take advantage of the different indexing options.

I do not tend to think of these as warehouse tables because they don't interact well with other products yet, ie they don't as yet have endpoints / aren't visible, eg Azure Data Factory can't move tables from there yet.

Finally I tend to think of ADLS as analogous to HDFS and U-SQL/ADLA as analogous to Spark.

HTH

Answer 2

By definition a data lake is a huge repository storing raw data in it's native format until needed. Lakes use a flat architecture rather than nested (http://searchaws.techtarget.com/definition/data-lake). Data in the lake has a unique ID and metadata tags, which are used in queries.

So data lakes can store structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Structured data would include SQL database type data in tables with rows and columns. Semi-structured would be CSV files and the like. And unstructured data is anything and everything -- emails, PDFs, video, binary. It's that ID and the metadata tags that help users find data inside the lake.

To keep a data lake manageable, successful implementers rotate, archive or purge data from the lake on a regular basis. Otherwise it becomes what some have called a "data swamp", basically a graveyard of data.

The traditional ELT process is better suited to data warehouses because they are more structured and data in a warehouse is there for a purpose. Data lakes, being less structured, are more suited to other approaches such as ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), because they store raw data that is only categorized by each query. (See this article by Panopoly for a discussion of ELT vs ETL.) For example, you want to see customer data from 2010. When you query a data lake for that you will get everything from accounting data, CRM records and even emails from 2010. You cannot analyze that data until it has been transformed into usable formats where the common denominators are customers + 2010.

Answer 3

To me, the answer is "money" and "resources"
(and probably correlated to use of Excel to consume data :) )

I've been through a few migrations from RDBMS to Hadoop/Azure platforms and it comes down to the cost/budget and use-cases:

1) Port legacy reporting systems to new architectures

2) Skillset of end-users who will consume the data to drive business value

3) The type of data being processed by the end user

4) Skillset of support staff who will support the end users

5) Whether the purpose of migration is to reduce infrastructure support costs, or enable new capabilities.

Some more details for a few of the above:

Legacy reporting systems often are based either on some analytics software or homegrown system that, over time, has a deeply embedded expectation for clean, governed, structured, strongly-typed data. Switching out the backend system often requires publishing the exact same structures to avoid replacing the entire analytics solution and code base.

Skillsets are a primary concern as well, because your often talking about hundreds to thousands of folks who are used to using Excel, with some knowing SQL. Few end-users, in my experience, and few Analysts I've worked with know how to program. Statisticians and Data Engineers tend towards R/Python. And developers with Java/C# experience tend towards Scala/Python.

Data Types are a clincher for what tool is right for the job... but here you have a big conflict, because there are folks who understand how to work with "Data Rectangles" (e.g. dataframes/tabular data), and those who know how to work with other formats. However, I still find folks consistently turning semi-structured/binary/unstructured data into a table as soon as they need to get a result operationalized... because support is hard to find for Spark.