Data Lakehouse: A survey and experimental study

Efficient big data management is a dire necessity to manage the exponential growth in data generated by digital information systems to produce usable knowledge. Structured databases, data lakes, and warehouses have each provided a solution with varying degrees of success. However, a new and superior solution, the data Lakehouse, has emerged to extract actionable insights from unstructured data ingested from distributed sources. By combining the strengths of data warehouses and data lakes, the data Lakehouse can process and merge data quickly while ingesting and storing high-speed unstructured data with post-storage transformation and analytics capabilities. The Lakehouse architecture offers the necessary features for optimal functionality and has gained significant attention in the big data management research community. In this paper, we compare data lake, warehouse, and lakehouse systems, highlight their strengths and shortcomings, identify the desired features to handle the evolving challenges in big data management and analysis and propose an advanced data Lakehouse architecture. We also demonstrate the performance of three state-of-the-art data management systems namely HDFS data lake, Hive data warehouse, and Delta lakehouse in managing data for analytical query responses through an experimental study.