The Warehouse

The data vault has long been viewed as a model best suited for historical and archival enterprise data. Its “insert only”, business-process approach to raw, unadulterated data is ideal for low-maintenance storage of all enterprise-generated information from all systems. Use cases for data vaults have traditionally revolved around historical tracking and auditing . . . however, the perception has largely been that it is ill-suited to analytics due to its many-to-many relationships and dispersed structure. In fact data vaults are often used as a “lightly modelled stage” for traditional star-schema data warehouses.

But the data vault may be best suited for a use case that...

If you feel like you’re “drowning” in jargon and buzzwords surrounding the recent developments in data lakes and their ilk, you are not alone. A recent TDWI survey showed rapidly increasing adoption of data lakes as a source of big data analytics, though it also revealed barriers to success and confusion around implementation value. Much of this confusion stems from myths and misperceptions around the technical and business uses of a data lake. This article will examine the proper use of a data lake, and how proper governance can prevent it from becoming the dreaded data swamp.

To be clear, a data lake is not a data management platform, in that it is not an integrated, ce...