Data Lake or Warehouse?

Concepts: paDataLake

This question tests whether you understand the economics and tradeoffs, not just the definitions. The answer has shifted dramatically since 2022. The interviewer wants to hear you reason about it, not recite a comparison chart. The Traditional Split Data warehouses couple storage and compute into a managed service. You load structured data, it's optimized for SQL analytics, and you pay per query or per compute-second. Data lakes (object storage + Spark) store raw files in any format. You bring your own compute engine and pay for storage + compute separately. The Lakehouse Convergence The lakehouse combines open file formats on object storage with warehouse-grade query performance. The term was coined by one vendor, but every major cloud provider and warehouse moved here. The idea: store ev