Why a Data Lake makes your life easier

Data Lake vs Data Warehouse

A Data Warehouse is pre-fed with structured data. Business and IT have then jointly determined which building blocks will be "transported" modularly to the Data Warehouse. Data is migrated to a Data Warehouse in the Cloud. Once the data is stored modularly in the Data Warehouse, we translate your wishes into relevant insights step by step.  

A Data Lake, the word says it all, is a lake of data. This consists of much more raw data. So you can store your history and temporary data and recall it easily. In a Data Lake, you often store more complex and larger masses of data. A Data Lake provides the solution to store all available data, structured and unstructured. Yet without intended application.

So the biggest difference between a Data Lake and a Data warehouse is how data is stored and how easily you can access unstructured data.

The biggest benefits of a Data Lake

Good that we now know the difference, but is one better than the other? Above all, one is more than the other. By that, we don't mean "the Lake," but the amount of data. The biggest advantages we see in practice?  

• It makes life easier for Data Engineers, Business Intelligence Consultants and Data Scientists because a Data Lake is much more flexible than a Data Warehouse. An experiment is only minutes away from you
• Building a good Data Warehouse takes a lot of time compared to a Data Lake. Functionalities are easier and faster to call up. Where you used to work with a database, you can now work with data and information (derived data) at different layers for different use cases and audiences within the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2:

1. Curated zone (analytics, star schedules)
2. Cleansed zone (business driven)
3. Sensitive zone (PII data).
4. Laboratory zone (data science)
5. Raw zone (immutable data)

• A so-called Proof of Value stands faster, allowing earlier testing and delivering value faster to the business
• You search more easily in unstructured data, making new insights more readily available. Interrelationships and connections between new data are worth discovering
• A Data Lake is part of a Modern Data Warehouse. With the latest architecture provided by Microsoft, the Data Lake Architecture, automating processes becomes simple and also auditable and GDPR compliant

Our BI colleagues: ''It makes our lives easier and therefore we have more time to work on cooler puzzles that deliver value. You no longer have to spend months working on the delivery of a Data Warehouse''.

From the Golden Path principle, we want to work - just-in-time, measurably, irrefutably and scalably. Securely in the cloud and in the Agile Scrum way of working. New tech trends such as setting up a Data Lake we follow closely.

Choosing your Data Management strategy

It does not necessarily mean that a Data Lake is better than a Data warehouse. Its application varies by organization and depends on its purpose. In making an informed choice, it is helpful to consider the following points when choosing your Data Management strategy:  

1. What business strategy do we have? And what data strategy fits well with that?  

2. What laws & regulations are we dealing with? What option do we use to ensure we can best meet our Data Governance requirements?  

3. Is our data trusted, understood and accurate? In other words - what does our current Data Architecture look like? How is Data Security handled? And how do we want to handle Data Storage in the future?  

We therefore choose this architecture for all our new projects because it can grow with future client demands. And our clients are thus flexible and scalable.  

• ‍Readhow we helped Humanitas get a Modern Data Warehouse ‍
• How we are growing together with Air Miles toward data capability?

Want to know how to take the first steps in choosing your Data Management strategy, what architecture choices you'll encounter and what the roadmap means for internal & external stakeholders? Find out in the next blog!

A Data Lake makes your life easier but is not the only option

Whatever choice you make with your organization. You don't necessarily have to put everything in a single tool or database. We always recommend choosing the best solution from the Azure Stack. In our view, the Data Lake is an economical and safe choice when you consider the current data demands in the market and the rapidly changing business rules. Your Data Lake can also be easily linked back to the Azure Data Factory and data can be stored (temporarily) in Workspaces via Azure Synapse. Insights? Those are loaded either from the SQL database or directly from the Data Lake and presented via Power BI. Future-proof guaranteed!  

Would you like to spar with no obligation about the best solution for your organization? Contact Hans. Would you like to know how colleagues Xander and Stephan put this application into daily practice with clients and whether that is something for you too? TeamValue | Business Intelligence Consultant