Data engineering·Files, formats and table layers
everything anyone might ever need is in a bucket as files, in whatever shape it arrived, and finding the useful part is your problem.
Data lake
Also calledlake, object store lake
Cheap object storage holding data in open file formats, with no enforced schema at write time. It is the answer to 'we cannot afford to decide yet': you keep everything and interpret it later, which is genuinely valuable when the questions have not been asked. What it does not give you is transactions, consistent multi-file updates or any guarantee that two readers see the same thing, which is the gap the table formats were invented to close.