The evolution from traditional data warehouses to modern data lakehouses marks a significant shift in how businesses approach data management. Data warehouses once served as the centralized repository for structured data and facilitated rapid query performance with robust governance mechanisms. However, companies faced challenges such as high storage costs, rigid schema enforcement, and limited support for AI and machine learning workloads. By Fawaz Ghali, PhD.
The article covers:
- The emergence of Data Lakehouses
- Apache Iceberg: A leading table format for Data Lakehouses
- The evolution from Hive to Iceberg
- Benefits of Apache Iceberg in data management
- Challenges addressed by Apache Iceberg in Data Lakehouse models
Data lakes emerged as solutions to these problems by offering a scalable and cost-effective approach to storing unstructured, semi-structured, and even structured data in cheap storage like Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage, Google Cloud Storage, and Hadoop Distributed File System. While this offered several benefits such as reduced storage costs and the use of novel data formats, it also presented challenges like inconsistent data sets, inefficient query performance due to full table scans, and lack of ACID transactions.
Enter Apache Iceberg, a modern table format that solves these issues by providing ACID transactions for reliable data updates and consistency, schema evolution without breaking existing queries, and efficient management of metadata to reduce unnecessary file scans and enhance query execution speed. This transformation allows companies transitioning into a data lakehouse approach to manage their information cost-effectively and at scale while maintaining high performance.
As part of this transition, the final two blog posts in this series will delve deeper into Apache Iceberg’s architecture and explore query mechanisms within Iceberg tables, emphasizing its role in modern data architectures.
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