datalakehouse

A datalakehouse is a modern data architecture that combines the scalability and cost-effectiveness of a data lake with the data management and structure features of a data warehouse. It aims to address the limitations of traditional approaches, such as the difficulty of managing unstructured data in data warehouses and the lack of ACID transactions and schema enforcement in data lakes.

The core concept of a datalakehouse is to store all types of data, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured, in a cost-effective object storage layer, similar to a data lake. However, it introduces a metadata and transaction layer on top of this storage. This layer enables data warehouse-like capabilities such as schema enforcement, ACID transactions (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), data versioning, and efficient querying.

Key components often found in a datalakehouse architecture include open file formats like Parquet or ORC for efficient data storage, a transactional layer (e.g., Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg) for managing data reliability and performance, and a query engine (e.g., Spark, Presto, Trino) for accessing and processing the data.

The benefits of a datalakehouse include unified data access, enabling both data science workloads on raw data and business intelligence on curated data within the same system. It reduces data duplication and ETL complexity compared to maintaining separate data lakes and data warehouses. This architecture is designed to be more agile and cost-effective for organizations dealing with large volumes and varieties of data.