A primer on Azure Data Lake

Azure Data Lake provides storage for big data solutions. It is specially designed for storing the large amounts of data that are typically needed in big data solutions. It is an Azure-provided managed service. Customers need to bring their data and store it in a data lake.

There are two versions of Azure Data Lake Storage: version 1 (Gen1) and the current version, version 2 (Gen2). Gen2 has all the functionality of Gen1, but one particular difference is that it is built on top of Azure Blob storage.

As Azure Blob storage is highly available, can be replicated multiple times, is disaster-ready, and is low in cost, these benefits are transferred to Gen2 Data Lake. Data Lake can store any kind of data, including relational, non-relational, file system–based, and hierarchical data.

Creating a Data Lake Gen2 instance is as simple as creating a new storage account. The only change that needs to be done is enabling the hierarchical...