Data Swamp joke is getting old… Data Lake alternatives

Lots of bandwagon jumping onto the “Data Lake”. Which leads to the jokes about how to avoid the Data Swamp, or Data Cesspool.

I’ve never quite understood why anyone would call it a Data Lake. Nobody knows what’s in a lake, you have to go fishing. Lakes get polluted. They freeze over and cause ice damage. They grow weeds. So maybe the Data Lake jokes are deserved.

Some are now calling it a data reservoir. Marginally better perhaps, since a reservoir is a managed resource. But a reservoir can still get polluted, as was recently widely reported in Oregon.

IBM refers to a Landing and Exploration zone as part of the IBM Watson Foundations architecture. I think this term better depicts the purpose of Hadoop in a data architecture.