Data Lakes vs. Data Lakehouses: A Salesforce Admin’s Guide

Salesforce Admins often feel that their responsibilities keep evolving and extending beyond just managing the application. Your primary focus has always included ensuring the integrity and security of your SFDC data but now you’re becoming an integral part of ensuring your organization can actually use and consume its data. Data-driven decision-making is no longer just a buzzword, it’s becoming a reality rapidly. Understanding the differences between data lakes and data lakehouses is imperative to deriving actionable insights. 

This post builds on our previous post about data lakes and guides you through the concept of data lakehouses to help you determine the best solution for your Salesforce environment.

Quick Refresher: What is a Data Lake?

In A Salesforce Admin’s Guide to Data Lakes, we covered how data lakes “are a dynamic repository that collect, store, and secure a wide range of data types”. To briefly recap:

• Data lakes collect and store, distill, process, and make data available for consumption. They’re vast repositories that are designed as raw data stores for large volumes of structured and unstructured data. They allow you to maintain data from disparate systems in its natural form for scalability and flexibility.
• Customer 360 data lake takes a specialized approach by ingesting data from all customer interactions and touchpoints to create a comprehensive view of the customer. This ultimately centralizes customer data for more effective analytics and rapid, informed decision-making.
• Salesforce data serves as a vital component of your data lake, enriching the Customer 360 view and ensuring your data lake is built with a solid foundation of customer data.
• Generally, data lakes are more cost-effective for storing massive amounts of data compared to traditional databases, making it suitable for backup storage and data analytics.

For a more detailed overview, check out our previous post and video to learn more. 

Now that we’ve recapped data lakes, let’s explore how data lakehouses build upon a data lake and extend these capabilities to offer an even more versatile and scalable solution.

Introducing Data Lakehouses: The Next Evolution

What is a Data Lakehouse?

A data lakehouse is a modern data architecture that takes the best parts of both data lakes and data warehouses to provide an architecture that’s cost-effective, flexible, and highly performative. This evolved approach offers greater versatility and control over your data so that you can better approach machine learning, business intelligence, and predictive analytics. 

Data Lakehouse vs. Data Lake vs. Data Warehouse

Even though data lakehouses are designed as a blend between a data lake and data warehouse, it’s crucial that Salesforce Admins understand how they’re similar and different so that you can select the best data strategy for your organization’s customer data.

Data lakehouses offer the best balance of the three, making them ideal for organizations needing both near real-time insights and advanced analytics.

How Does a Data Lakehouse Work?

At its core, a data lakehouse is designed to be a hybrid approach that brings the benefits of data lakes and data warehouses, allowing you to experience the best of both worlds without compromise. Key features of a data lakehouse include:

• Data management functionality to apply schema management, enforce data governance, and provide ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes and data cleansing.
• ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transaction support to ensure data consistency when multiple users can update, delete, read, and write at the same time. 
• Unified data storage that supports multiple data types to accommodate diverse data types and analytical workloads.
• High-performance query engine that’s optimized for advanced analytics and lightning-fast queries. This reduces latency and enhances the performance of data operations, such as near-real-time analytics.
• Business intelligence tools (e.g., Tableau, Salesforce Data Cloud, CRM Analytics, AWS QuickSight, PowerBI) directly connect to the data lakehouse with clicks, not code, to streamline data-driven decision-making in industry-standard applications. 

With a data lakehouse, your organization can leverage Salesforce data to easily create a comprehensive Customer 360 view where you can run complex queries and generate advanced reporting based on your entire Salesforce history.

How to Get a Data Lakehouse With GRAX

From data protection (backup and recovery) to data reuse, GRAX has you covered throughout your Salesforce data lifecycle. With the GRAX Data Lakehouse, you now have the ultimate easy button for accelerating reporting, training, and acting on your Salesforce history. Simply put, we make data lakehouses for Salesforce easy so that you can adapt faster and focus on answering business questions instead of complex data operations. 

The GRAX Data Lakehouse combines the flexibility and performance of the GRAX Data Lake with the capabilities of a data warehouse so that you can have full control and access to your data under a unified data platform that:

• Quickly deploys a data lakehouse with one click and without the headaches.
• Makes data available same-day for timely advanced analytics.
• Returns query results at lightning-fast speeds to explore your history.
• Provides unlimited data replay without additional Salesforce API calls.
• Handles schema changes automatically by grabbing all your history.
• Maximizes data reuse to take your data to any industry standard BI tools without building integrations.

Because the role of the Salesforce Administrator is ever-evolving, it’s critical for you to invest in a solution that can both protect your data and ensure you get a return on your investment. With a data lakhouse, Salesforce Admins can not only protect and manage data more effectively but also unlock its full potential, driving innovation and achieving business goals.

Check out our GRAX Data Lakehouse to see how GRAX can help you achieve a seamless, secure, and scalable data strategy that empowers your organization to make better, data-driven decisions.

Summary

Data lakehouses have emerged as a powerful solution that can help your organization seamlessly manage data and accelerate analytics-making it an ideal solution to enable data-driven decision-making and improve data culture. 

To stay competitive, Salesforce Admins need to understand how data lakehouses work so that they can optimize your data strategy and stay ahead in a data-centric world.