What is a data lake? Massively scalable storage for big data analytics

In 2011, James Dixon, then CTO of the business intelligence company Pentaho, coined the term data lake. He described the data lake in contrast to the information silos typical of data marts, which were popular at the time: 

If you think of a data mart as a store of bottled water—cleansed and packaged and structured for easy consumption—the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state. The contents of the data lake stream …

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