Abstract

This paper argues that the data warehouse architecture as we know it today will wither in the coming years and be replaced by a new architectural pattern, the Lakehouse, which will (i) be based on open direct-access data formats, such as Apache Parquet, (ii) have firstclass support for machine learning and data science, and (iii) offer state-of-the-art performance. Lakehouses can help address several major challenges with data warehouses, including data staleness, reliability, total cost of ownership, data lock-in, and limited use-case support. We discuss how the industry is already moving toward Lakehouses and how this shift may affect work in data management. We also report results from a Lakehouse system using Parquet that is competitive with popular cloud data warehouses on TPC-DS.