Data Lakes: A Survey of Functions and Systems

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 35, pp. 12571–12590

Abstract

Data lakes are becoming increasingly prevalent for big data management and data analytics. In contrast to traditional ‘schema-on-write’ approaches such as data warehouses, data lakes are repositories storing raw data in its original formats and providing a common access interface. Despite the strong interest raised from both academia and industry, there is a large body of ambiguity regarding the definition, functions and available technologies for data lakes. A complete, coherent picture of data lake challenges and solutions is still missing. This survey reviews the development, architectures, and systems of data lakes. We provide a comprehensive overview of research questions for designing and building data lakes. We classify the existing approaches and systems based on their provided functions for data lakes, which makes this survey a useful technical reference for designing, implementing and deploying data lakes. We hope that the thorough comparison of existing solutions and the discussion of open research challenges in this survey will motivate the future development of data lake research and practice.

Authors 4

1. Rihan Hai

   Delft University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Software Technology, Delft University of Technology, Delft, CD, Netherlands

2. Christos Koutras

   Delft University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Software Technology, Delft University of Technology, Delft, CD, Netherlands

3. Christoph Quix

   Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology · Hochschule Niederrhein

   Affiliation as printed

   Hochschule Niederrhein, Krefeld, Germany and Fraunhofer FIT, Hochschule Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Krefeld, Germany

   Fraunhofer FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany

4. Matthias Jarke Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University · Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

   Fraunhofer FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany