Thought experiment: let’s say your app gets a message from somewhere, perhaps from another app, but you don’t know from where. The message contains the number 47 but no other information. What should your app do with the message?

The answer: nothing. There’s no way for your app to make any sense out of a single datum with no context, no additional information or metadata about the datum itself. Now, let’s scale up this thought experiment to a data lake. There are a few common definitions of data lake, but perhaps the most straightforward is a storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed.

Source: intellyx.com
Author: Jason Bloomberg