Why Data Lakehouse Architecture Now?

Data lakehouse architecture is emerging as a powerful solution that integrates the strengths of data lakes and data warehouses, offering a more efficient and flexible data management approach. Unlike traditional data warehouses, which require extensive data preparation and movement, lakehouses allow business intelligence, reporting, data science, and machine learning experts to collaborate on the same data without unnecessary data transfers. This architecture provides optionality by maintaining data in low-cost storage, supporting open data formats to avoid vendor lock-in, and enabling a data consumption layer that facilitates real-time, secure, and scalable data sharing, exemplified by the Delta Sharing protocol. The use of Delta Lake's open-source table format enhances performance by allowing time travel features, metadata exposure, and query optimizations. Companies like EMIS Health have successfully implemented data lakehouses to manage vast data volumes efficiently, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating the architecture's capability to meet complex data analytics needs in real time.