Data Lakehouse

A data lakehouse is an architecture that combines the low-cost, flexible storage of a data lake with the performance, ACID transaction support, and governance features of a data warehouse - in a single system. Platforms like Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, and Apache Hudi implement the lakehouse pattern on top of cloud object storage.

The lakehouse emerged to solve the two-architecture problem: organizations had a data lake for raw storage (cheap, flexible, poor for analytics) and a data warehouse for cleaned analytical data (expensive, fast, rigid). The lakehouse collapses these into one: raw and transformed data live in the same object store, with a table format layer providing warehouse-like query performance.

For data pipeline builders, the lakehouse means you can read API data directly into Parquet files on S3, apply ACID-compliant updates as new data arrives, and query with SQL-native BI tools - without loading data into a separate warehouse.