Architecting Data Lakes

by Alice LaPlante, Ben Sharma

Many organizations use Hadoop-driven data lakes as an adjunct staging area for their enterprise data warehouses (EDW). But for those companies ready to take the plunge, a data lake is far more useful as a one-stop-shop for extracting insights from their vast collection of data. With this eBook, you’ll learn best practices for building, maintaining, and deriving value from a Hadoop data lake in production environments.
Authors Alice LaPlante and Ben Sharma explain how a data lake will enable your organization to manage an increasing volume of datasets—from blog postings and product reviews to streaming data—and to discover important relationships between them. Whether you want to control administrative costs in healthcare or reduce risk in financial services, this ebook addresses the architectural considerations and required capabilities you need to build your own data lake.
With this report, you’ll learn:
- The key attributes of a data lake, including its ability to store information in native formats for later processing
- Why implementing data management and governance in your data lake is crucial
- How to address various challenges for building and managing a data lake
- Self-service options that enable different users to access the data lake without help from IT
- Emerging trends that will shape the future of data lakes
Ben Sharma, CEO and cofounder of Zaloni, is a passionate technologist with experience in solutions architecture and service delivery of big data, analytics, and enterprise infrastructure solutions. His expertise ranges from business development to production deployment in technologies including Hadoop, HBase, databases, virtualization, and storage.

64 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer. She also teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her fiction has been widely published in Epoch, Southwestern Review, and other literary journals. Alice is the author of five books, including the LA Times bestseller Method and Madness: The Making of a Story (W.W. Norton 2009). Her latest book, the novel Turn of Mind, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2011 and won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize for 2011. She lives with her family in Northern California.

Reviews

[Bogdan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aside for the commercial/proprietary solutions to some of the challenges in the book, I found it very useful. I don't believe the book is for a technical audience, but as an engineer it allowed me to familiarize myself with many terms (or 'buzzwords') and architectures in the field.

I skim through it every now and then just to refresh my memory.

[Wojtek Gawroński · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not the greatest book about the topic, but it has some valid points (e.g. challenges, complications) and an interesting chapter about the future (it was funny to see how much of those predictions are currently true).