Chapter 4: Working with Azure Data Lake
A data lake is a central storage system that stores data in its raw format. It is used to collect huge amounts of data that are yet to be analyzed by analysts and data scientists or for regulatory purposes. As the amount of information and the variety of data that a company operates with increases, it gets increasingly difficult to preprocess and store it in a traditional data warehouse. By design, data lakes are built to handle unstructured and semi-structured data with no pre-defined schema.
On-premise data lakes are difficult to scale and require thorough requirements and cost estimations. Cloud data lakes are often considered an easier-to-use and -scale alternative. In this chapter, we will go through a set of recipes that will help you to launch a data lake, load data from external storage, and build ETL/ELT pipelines around it.
Azure Data Lake Gen2 can store both structured and unstructured data. In this chapter, we will load...