For years, buoyed by technologies like Apache Hadoop, organizations have been seeking to build data lakes — enterprise-wide data management platforms that allow them to store all of their data in their native format. Data lakes promise to break down information silos by providing a single data repository the entire organization can use for everything from business analytics to data mining. Raw and ungoverned, data lakes have been pitched as a big data catch-all and cure-all.
But Avi Perez, CTO of business intelligence (BI) software specialist Pyramid Analytics says he sees many customers and prospects whose data lakes are deteriorating into data swamps — massive repositories of data that are completely inaccessible to end users.