Data lake

Roles that need it

• Data Scientist
• Data Analyst
• Data Governance Analyst
• Data Scientist (Banking)

Skills it belongs to

• Data platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery)
• Data modelling and schema design

Related concepts

• Data warehouseA data warehouse is a central database that stores cleaned, structured and historical data from many source systems, organised for reporting and analysis. Data marts are smaller subject-specific extracts of it, for example for finance or risk.
• Data lakehouseA data lakehouse is an architecture that combines the low-cost raw storage of a data lake with the table structure, transactions and governance of a data warehouse, so reporting and machine learning can work on the same platform.
• Data catalogueA data catalogue is a searchable inventory of an organisation's data assets with their metadata: descriptions, owners, location, quality scores and lineage. Users search it to find trusted data before building a report or model. Also spelled data catalog.

Sources

• SP 800-145, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, NIST (external site) accessed 31 Oct 2026

Updated 31 Oct 2026.