Press "Enter" to skip to content

Thinking About The Data Lake

Ust Oldfield gives architectural hints on Azure Data Lake Store:

It is very easy to treat a data lake as a dumping ground for anything and everything. Microsoft’s sale pitch says exactly this – “Storage is cheap, Store everything!!”. We tend to agree – but if the data is completely malformed, inaccurate, out of date or completely unintelligible, then it’s no use at all and will confuse anyone trying to make sense of the data. This will essentially create a data swamp, which no one will want to go into. Bad data & poorly managed files erode trust in the lake as a source of information. Dumping is bad.

This is how you get data swamps (a term which I’m so happy is catching on).  Read the whole thing.