Brenner Heintz and Denny Lee walk us through solving data engineering problems with Delta Lake:
As a result, companies tend to have a lot of raw, unstructured data that they’ve collected from various sources sitting stagnant in data lakes. Without a way to reliably combine historical data with real-time streaming data, and add structure to the data so that it can be fed into machine learning models, these data lakes can quickly become convoluted, unorganized messes that have given rise to the term “data swamps.”
Before a single data point has been transformed or analyzed, data engineers have already run into their first dilemma: how to bring together processing of historical (“batch”) data, and real-time streaming data. Traditionally, one might use a lambda architecture to bridge this gap, but that presents problems of its own stemming from lambda’s complexity, as well as its tendency to cause data loss or corruption.
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