What Is a Cloud Data Lake

A data lake is a centralized repository designed to store, process, and secure large amounts of structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. It can store data in its native format and process any variety of it, ignoring size limits. Learn more about modernizing your data lake on Google Cloud.

What is a data lake and how does it work?

Data Lakes allow you to import any amount of data that can come in real-time. Data is collected from multiple sources, and moved into the data lake in its original format. This process allows you to scale to data of any size, while saving time of defining data structures, schema, and transformations.

Why is it called a data lake?

Data Lake. Pentaho CTO James Dixon has generally been credited with coining the term “data lake”. He describes a data mart (a subset of a data warehouse) as akin to a bottle of water…”cleansed, packaged and structured for easy consumption” while a data lake is more like a body of water in its natural state.