🪙Business Intelligence: Lakehouses (Just the Quotes)

"A data lakehouse is an amalgamation of the best components from both data lakes and data warehouses. A data lakehouse implements data structure and data management features from data warehouses into a cost-effective storage like a data lake. It tries to combine the best from both worlds - data lake - based Big Data analytics and a data warehouse." (Bhadresh Shiyal, "Beginning Azure Synapse Analytics: Transition from Data Warehouse to Data Lakehouse", 2021) 

"A defining characteristic of the data lakehouse architecture is allowing direct access to data as files while retaining the valuable properties of a data warehouse. Just do both!" (Bill Inmon et al, "Building the Data Lakehouse", 2021)

"Once you combine the data lake along with analytical infrastructure, the entire infrastructure can be called a data lakehouse. [...] The data lake without the analytical infrastructure simply becomes a data swamp. And a data swamp does no one any good." (Bill Inmon et al, "Building the Data Lakehouse", 2021)

"The data lakehouse architecture presents an opportunity comparable to the one seen during the early years of the data warehouse market. The unique ability of the lakehouse to manage data in an open environment, blend all varieties of data from all parts of the enterprise, and combine the data science focus of the data lake with the end user analytics of the data warehouse will unlock incredible value for organizations. [...] The lakehouse architecture equally makes it natural to manage and apply models where the data lives." (Bill Inmon et al, "Building the Data Lakehouse", 2021)

"With the data lakehouse, it is possible to achieve a level of analytics and machine learning that is not feasible or possible any other way. But like all architectural structures, the data lakehouse requires an understanding of architecture and an ability to plan and create a blueprint." (Bill Inmon et al, "Building the Data Lakehouse", 2021)

"Lakehouse is a new architecture and data storage paradigm that combines the characteristics of both data warehouses and data lakes to create a unified basis for all types of use cases to be built on top of it. There is no need to move data around. Data is curated and remains in an open format and serves as the single source of truth (SSOT) for all the consumption layers. A modern data platform has needs that span traditional data warehouses, data lakes, machine learning systems, and streaming systems and there is some overlap among these systems. A Lakehouse offers features that span all four systems [...]" (Anindita Mahapatra, "Simplifying Data Engineering and Analytics with Delta", 2022)

"Simply put, 'lakehouse' refers to an open data architecture that combines the best of data lakes and data warehouses on a single platform. At this point, it would be fair to say that a lakehouse is closer to a data lake than a data warehouse. In fact, it is an extension of your data lake to support all use cases, from BI to AI. All data science and ML personas who were shunted into downstream applications because the tools of their trade were so vastly different and can now share the same stage and have access to the same data as other data personas. This eliminates the need to stitch fragile systems together and leads to better data quality and end-to-end latencies since there is no need to copy data across disparate architectures." (Anindita Mahapatra, "Simplifying Data Engineering and Analytics with Delta", 2022)

"The lakehouse provides a key advantage over the modern data warehouse by eliminating the need to have two places to store the same data." (Rukmani Gopalan, "The Cloud Data Lake: A Guide to Building Robust Cloud Data Architecture", 2022)

"Traditional data lakes provide the necessary scalability, but not the real-time concurrency and latency needed for BI use cases. Delta comes to the rescue once again by providing performance at scale with a host of optimization techniques, such as caching, data compaction, and indexing. Previously, a subset of the curated data would be pushed to a warehouse to satisfy the latency and concurrency requirements of known queries. What this meant was that if a consumer needed a different access pattern or a slightly older dataset that was not available, they would have to request that their IT or data team get involved. This took data democratization a step backward. Ideally, we should allow people to access any data that they have privileges to. Delta Lake goes a step forward and allows BI tools to access data directly from the lake instead of accessing a sliver of the data in their expensive warehouses." (Anindita Mahapatra, "Simplifying Data Engineering and Analytics with Delta", 2022)

"Delta Lake is one solution for building data lakehouses, an open data architecture combining the best of data warehouses and data lakes." (Bennie Haelen & Dan Davis, "Delta Lake: Up and Running Modern Data Lakehouse Architectures with Delta Lake", 2024)

"It is very important to understand that data mesh is a concept, not a technology. It is all about an organizational and cultural shift within companies. The technology used to build a data mesh could follow the modern data warehouse, data fabric, or data lakehouse architecture - or domains could even follow different architectures." (James Serra, "Deciphering Data Architectures", 2024)

"The term data lakehouse is a portmanteau (blend) of data lake and data warehouse. [...] The concept of a lakehouse is to get rid of the relational data warehouse and use just one repository, a data lake, in your data architecture." (James Serra, "Deciphering Data Architectures", 2024)

"The lakehouse combines the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses for OLAP workloads. It merges the scalability and flexibility of data lakes with the management features and performance optimization of data warehouses. [...] A lakehouse eliminates the need for disjointed systems and provides a single, coherent platform for all forms of data analysis. Lakehouses enhance the performance of data queries and simplify data management, making it easier for organizations to derive insights from their data." (Denny Lee et al, "Delta Lake: The Definitive Guide", 2025)