CentralNotice From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search A data lake is a method of storing data within a system or repository, in its natural format, [1] that facilitates the collocation of data in various schemata and structural forms, usually object blobs or files. 1 Invention 2 Characteristics 3 Examples 4 Criticism 5 References Invention [ edit ] James Dixon, then chief technology officer at Pentaho coined the term [2] to contrast it with data mart , which is a smaller repository of interesting attributes extracted from raw data. [3] He argued that data marts have several inherent problems, and that data lakes are the optimal solution. These problems are often referred to as information siloing . PricewaterhouseCoopers said that data lakes could "put an end to data silos. [4] In their study on data lakes they noted that enterpr...