Data Lake Glossary Definition

A data lake is a collection of storage instances of various data assets additional to the originating data sources. These assets are stored in a near-exact, or even exact, copy of the source format. The purpose of a data lake is to present an unrefined view of data to only the most highly skilled analysts, to help them explore their data refinement and analysis techniques independent of any of the system-of-record compromises that may exist in a traditional analytic data store (such as a data mart or data warehouse).

In web, data, cloud, and DevOps environments, this term helps teams describe application infrastructure, data flow, deployment practices, integration points, or operational tooling. It is relevant to how systems are built, hosted, versioned, monitored, and maintained.