In 2011, James Dixon, then CTO of the business intelligence company Pentaho, coined the term data lake. He described the data lake in contrast to the information silos typical of data marts, which were popular at the time:If you think of a data mart as a store of bottled water—cleansed and packaged and structured for easy consumption—the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state. The contents of the data lake stream in from a source to fill the lake, and various users of the lake can come to examine, dive in, or take samples.