Company
Date Published
Author
Amit Sethi, VP, Data Technology and Engineering
Word count
1133
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) have evolved significantly over the decades to accommodate the increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data, progressing from SQL-based systems to high-performance computing appliances, followed by the introduction of Hadoop for big data processing. Despite Hadoop's revolutionary impact, its complexity and requirement for specialized expertise led to the emergence of cloud-based EDWs and data lakes like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks, which offer enhanced simplicity and management. The latest shift in the data landscape prioritizes cost reduction, avoidance of vendor lock-in, and the use of optimized compute engines tailored to specific workloads. Open-source technologies like Apache Iceberg are gaining traction as they decouple storage from compute layers, offering schema evolution, support for multiple compute engines, and ACID compliance, thus enabling a hybrid data architecture that blends the scalability of data lakes with the performance of traditional EDWs. This approach allows businesses to manage data more flexibly and cost-effectively by leveraging best-fit compute engines and reducing reliance on single vendors, while tools like New Relic provide observability and monitoring for these complex ecosystems.