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What is the Difference between a Data Lake and a Data Warehouse?
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Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
14m
Students
2257
Ratings
5/5
Description

Many organizations have implemented data lakes to great success, giving them a tactical business edge through the use of data analysis and predictive analytics.

This course covers the basics of data lakes, how they are different from data warehouses, and the components that make up a successful data lake.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand the difference between data warehouses and data lakes
  • Know what qualities make up a good data lake.
  • Learn about AWS Lake Formation and how it can transform the process of creating a data lake from taking months to days

Intended Audience

This course is intended for anyone who is responsible for managing business data or for those interested in creating a data lake in general.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this course, you should have a decent understanding of cloud computing and cloud architectures, specifically with Amazon Web Services.

Transcript

What is the difference between a data lake and a data warehouse?

When first getting into this space there might be some confusion between data lakes and data warehouses. That is fairly common.

The main difference between a data lake and a data warehouse is specificity and structure. 

A data lake is a formless blob of information, it is a pool of knowledge where we try to capture any relevant data from our business so that we can perform analytics on it.

A data warehouse is a specialized tool that allows you to perform analysis on a portion of that data, so you can make meaningful decisions from it. Generally, it is a subset of the data from the data lake with a specialized purpose. Your data warehouse Is an optimized database that is dealing with normalized, transformed, and cleaned-up versions of the data from the data lake.

 

About the Author

William Meadows is a passionately curious human currently living in the Bay Area in California. His career has included working with lasers, teaching teenagers how to code, and creating classes about cloud technology that are taught all over the world. His dedication to completing goals and helping others is what brings meaning to his life. In his free time, he enjoys reading Reddit, playing video games, and writing books.