Data lake — Glossary

Data lake

A data lake is storage for data in its raw, original form: event streams, logs, exports, and files, stored cheaply and structured later, if at all. Data engineers and data scientists work here; the lake is where data lands first, not where campaigns run from. Raw data usually has to be cleaned and structured before marketing can act on it. A lakehouse is a lake with warehouse-style querying layered on top.

Also known as

lake; lakehouse

In practice

For a marketer, “It’s in the lake” is really a timeline: the data isn’t audience-ready. Raw events land in the lake first, and someone has to model them into a warehouse or mart before a campaign can use them. In enterprise architectures the lake or lakehouse sits inside the central data platform, not the marketing stack.

Data warehouse Data mart

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Data Governance

Data Lakehouse