Welcome to Azure Data Lake Storage. In this brief lesson, I want to touch on Azure Data Lake Storage.

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 offers the analytics performance of an HDFS-compatible file system, while ALSO offering tiering and data lifecycle management features of blob storage. Other features and benefits now available in Gen 2, as a result, include data security, data durability, and replication options that you didn’t have before.

With Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, you have access to not only the Azure Data Lake Gen2 file system APIs, but also to the Blob REST APIs. As a result, you can interact with data in different ways.

The best part about it is the fact that enabling all this cool functionality is as simple as changing a setting in the storage account. Instead of needing to provision a new service and maintain a new service, and such, all you need to do is enable it on the storage account.

A key feature of Data Lake Storage Gen2 is the hierarchical namespace that’s added to blob storage. With a hierarchical namespace, objects and files are organized into a hierarchy of directories, which results in much more efficient data access. For example, renaming a directory becomes a single metadata operation on the directory being renamed, instead of a process that enumerates and processes all objects that share the name prefix of the directory.

Other key features of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 include Hadoop compatible access and a security model that supports ACL and POSIX permissions, including some extra granularity that’s specific to Data Lake Storage Gen 2. With an ABFS driver that’s optimized for big data analytics, data access is improved. And because Data Lake Storage Gen 2 offers low-cost storage capacity, as well as low-cost transactions, the service is cost-effective.