You mean Lake 'Shanty' Architecture (think DataSwamp vs DataLake) am I right?

But in all seriousness, I totally agree with your opinion on LakeHouse Architecture and am especially excited about Apache Iceberg (external table format) and the support and attention it's getting.

Although I don't think that selecting any of these data technologies/philosophies comes down to making a mutually exclusive decision. In my opinion, they either build on or compliment each other quite nicely.

For those that are interested, here are my descriptions of each...

Data Lake Arch - all of your data is stored on blob-storage (S3, etc) in a way that is partitioned thoughtfully and easily accessible, along with a meta-index/catalogue of what data is there, and where it is.

Lake House Arch - similar to a DataLake but data is structured and mutable, and hopefully allows for transactions/atomic-ops, schema evolution/drift, time-travel/rollback, so on... Ideally all of the properties that you usually assume to get with any sort of OLAP (maybe even OLTP) DB table. But the most important property in my opinion is that the table is accessible through any compatible compute/query engine/layer. Separating storage and compute has revolutionized the Data Warehouse as we know it, and this is the next iteration of this movement in my opinion.

Data Mesh/Grid Arch - designing how the data moves from a source all the way through each and every target while storing/capturing this information in an accessible catalogue/meta-database even as things transpire and change. As a result it provides data lineage and provenance, potentially labeling/tagging, inventory, data-dictionary-like information etc... This one is the most ambiguous and maybe most difficult to describe and probably design/implement, and to be honest I've never seen a real-life working example. I do think this functionality is a critical missing piece of the data stack, whether the solution is a Data Mesh/Grid or something else. Data Engineers have their work cutout on this one, mostly bc this is where their paths cross with those of Application/Service Developers, Software Engineers. In my opinion, developers are usually creating services/applications that are glorified CRUD wrappers around some kind of operational/transactional data store like MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, etc. Analytics, reporting, retention, volume, etc are usually an after thought and not their problem. Until someone hooks the operational data store up to their SQL IDE or Tableau/Looker and takes down prod. Then along comes the data engineer to come up with yet another ETL/ELT to get the data out of the operational data store and into a data warehouse so that reports and analytics can be run without taking prod down again.

Data Warehouse (modern) - Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) over detached/separated columnar (for now) data. Some Data Warehouses are already somewhat compatible with Data Lakes since they can use their MPP compute to index and access external tables. Some are already planning to be even more Lake House compatible by not only leveraging their own MPP compute against externally managed tables (eg), but also managing external tables in the first place. That includes managing schemas and running all of the DDLs (CREATE, ALTER, DROP, etc) as well as DQLs (SELECT) and DMLs (MERGE, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, ...). Querying data across native DB tables, external tables (potentially from multiple Lake Houses, Data Lakes) all becomes possible with a join in a SQL statement. Additionally this allows for all kinds of governance related functionality as well. Masking, row/column level security, logging, auditing, so on.

As you might be able to tell from this post (and my post history) is that I'm a big fan of Snowflake. I'm excited for Snowflake managed Iceberg tables and then consume the data with a different compute/query engine. Snowflake (or other modern DW) could prepare the data (ETL/calc/crunch/etc) and then manage (DDL & DML) it in an Iceberg table. Then something like DuckDB could consume the Iceberg table schema and listen for table changes (oplog?), and then read/query the data performing last-mile analytics (pagination, order, filter, aggs, etc).

DuckDB doesn't support Apache Iceberg, but it can read parquet files which are used internally in Iceberg. Obviously supporting external tables is far more complex than just reading a parquet file, but I don't see why this isn't in their future. DuckDB guys, I know you're out there reading this :)

https://iceberg.apache.org/

https://www.snowflake.com/guides/olap-vs-oltp

https://www.snowflake.com/blog/iceberg-tables-powering-open-...

Finally one of my favorite articles:

https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...