Data engineering·Files, formats and table layers
there are nine thousand tables in the bucket, four of them are used, and nobody knows which four.
Data swamp
Also calledswamp, ungoverned lake
A lake that accumulated data without ownership, documentation or lifecycle, so nothing in it can be trusted or safely deleted. It is the predictable end state of storing everything with no catalogue and no retention, and it is expensive twice: in storage and in every hour spent working out which of five similar tables is the real one. It is worth naming because the remedy is governance and deletion rather than more storage.