Data lakes are a centralized repository that allows storage of structured & unstructured data. The data is usually stored as-is, i.e. without transforming and pre-structuring the data. The data lake is a source to run analytics on and can be used for processing real time data and machine learning.

Since the data is available, data lakes allow “query at run time”.

A caution: If not managed right or done without governance, a data lake can very quickly turn into a data swamp.

Data lakes allow data to be extracted once and used any number of times reducing work that needs to be performed. This also means that transactional systems are not touched every time data is required.

Data is available for future analytical needs.