Okuzeka
Data Science & Analytics vocabulary · Data Pipelines and Warehousing

Data lake

Meaning in data science & analytics, with examples

nounCommon term

In data science & analytics, data lake means: A large storage system that holds huge amounts of raw data in its original format, structured or not, until someone needs to process and analyse it.

In Turkish: veri gölü

How it is used

Usually built on cloud storage such as Amazon S3. It is cheaper and more flexible than a warehouse but harder to query. A badly managed lake is jokingly called a 'data swamp', and a design that combines both is called a 'lakehouse'.

Example sentences

  1. All the raw clickstream logs go into the data lake first.

  2. The data lake has everything, but nobody knows which files are current.

Common collocations

  • store in the data lake
  • cloud data lake
  • data lake storage
  • lakehouse
  • data warehouseA central database designed for analysis that stores cleaned, structured data from many systems, such as sales, marketing and finance, often over many years.
  • raw dataData in the form in which it was first collected or exported, before anyone has cleaned, combined or summarised it.
  • data pipelineA series of automated steps that moves data from its sources, transforms it and delivers it to a destination such as a warehouse, dashboard or model.
  • ETLShort for extract, transform, load: the process of taking data out of source systems, cleaning and reshaping it, and loading it into a warehouse.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Data Pipelines and Warehousing

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: