With the evolution of technology, the amount of data generated worldwide (mainly through smartphones, social media, and IoT) will grow rapidly to 181 zettabytes of data by 2025, according to the international study Data Never Sleeps 10.0. Against this backdrop, the concept of data lakes is catching on among businesses that want to make the most of their data because of its many benefits. What is a data lake?

The term data lake was first coined by James Dixon, CTO of Pentaho, a data integration and analytics platform, in his blog “Union of the States: A Data Lake Use Case”. Data lakes are data warehousing repositories that provide big data analytics natively from multiple sources. It helps decision-making by running various types of analytics, such as dashboards, visualizations, big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning. There is no size limit, and various types of data are stored.

Unlike data warehouses, where large amounts of data are stored in a structured form, data lakes collect raw and unprocessed data in various formats for data analysts. Structured data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data can be stored, and when storing data, the search can be accelerated by linking identifiers and metadata tags. The users of data lakes are data scientists and developers, data warehouse specialists, and business analysts.

The data warehouse is an advantageous data model for reporting because it uses structured data for one purpose, but it is inappropriate in terms of cost and time to collect and use large amounts of unstructured data needed for big data technology. Currently, most data lakes are implemented in the cloud.

With a data lake, all data is retained, not purged or filtered before storage, and is stored in an undefined state until it is queried. The data in a data lake is transformed when it is needed for analysis, in which case a schema is applied to make the data analyzeable. While the purpose of data lake data is accumulated without a predefined purpose, data warehouse data is defined in advance.

This type of data warehouse, applied to the health domain, is known as a Health Data Lake. The Plan for Recovery, Transformation and Economic Resilience (PRTR) foresees funds to develop a huge health data lake, called the National Health Data Space, which “will make it possible to improve diagnoses and treatments based on the massive analysis of information collected from the autonomous health systems”, according to the Ministry of Health.

Data Lake House, the new trend

Given the differences between data lakes and data warehouses, most companies choose to operate both systems at the same time in a complementary way. However, a new trend is also emerging that combines the advantages of both types of repositories: the Data Lake House. Roughly speaking, they implement the data structuring and data management capabilities of a data warehouse but do so with the flexibility and low cost of a data lake.

A report by Adroit Market Research forecasts that, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.0%, the global data lake market will reach $25.49 billion by 2029. Rising demand for data governance and security, the growing trend of cloud-based deployments, and the increasing need for analytics and big data solutions are factors contributing to the growth of the data lake market.

Key players in the global data lake market include:

• Cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Data lake software vendors: Cloudera, Hortonworks, Databricks, Snowflake, Confluent, and Teradata
• Data integration and analytics vendors: Informatica, Talend, IBM, Oracle, and SAS
• Systems integrators: Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, IBM Global Business Services

These companies offer a range of data lake products and services, including data lake management platforms, data lake storage, data lake analytics, and data lake consulting.

In addition to the major players listed above, there are also a number of smaller, specialized companies that offer data lake products and services. These companies may focus on specific industries or use cases, such as data lakes for healthcare or data lakes for machine learning.

The data Iake market is growing rapidly, and new companies are entering the market all the time. As businesses continue to invest in data lakes, the key players in the market are likely to continue to evolve.

Final thoughts

Data lakes are a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to collect, store, and analyze large volumes of data. They offer a number of advantages over traditional data warehouses, including the ability to store all types of data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and the ability to perform real-time analytics.

As businesses continue to invest in data lakes, we can expect to see new and innovative solutions emerge that make it easier and more affordable to collect, store, and analyze large volumes of data.

Overall, data lakes are a promising technology with the potential to revolutionize the way businesses make decisions.

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