Data Lake business requirements
Data lakes are supposed to provide access to structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data to users. The business requirements of data lakes drive what kind of data will be stored in a data lake and who will have access to it. In the next section, we will understand the business requirements of a company that wants to build a data lake.
Note
Origins of the word Data Lake
James Dixon, the founder and CTO of Pentaho, coined the term data lake in his blog. He has defined the concept of a Data Lake as follows:" If you think of a datamart as a store of bottled water - cleansed and packaged and structured for easy consumption - the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state. The contents of the data lake stream in from a source to fill the lake, and various users of the lake can come to examine, dive in, or take samples." (Dixon, 2010)
Understanding the business requirements
Let's look at a fictional financial services company...