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

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 Salesforce data, but now you’re becoming an integral part of ensuring your organization can actually use and consume its data. In today’s fast-paced business environment, data-driven decision-making is no longer just a buzzword—it’s rapidly becoming a necessity. As a result, understanding the differences between data lakes and data lakehouses is crucial for deriving actionable insights and staying competitive in a data-centric world.
This guide builds on our previous post about data lakes and introduces the concept of data lakehouses, helping you determine the best solution for your Salesforce environment.
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Quick Refresher: What is a Data Lake?
In A Salesforce Admin’s Guide to Data Lakes, we covered how data lakes act as a dynamic repository that collects, stores, and secures a wide range of data types. To briefly recap:
- Data lakes collect, store, distill, process, and make data available for consumption. They are vast repositories designed for storing large volumes of structured and unstructured data. The key advantage here is the ability to maintain data from disparate systems in its natural form, ensuring scalability and flexibility for various data operations.
- Customer 360 data lake takes this a step further by ingesting data from all customer interactions and touchpoints, creating a comprehensive view of the customer. This centralized approach to customer data makes it easier to perform effective analytics and drive rapid, informed decision-making.
- Salesforce data is a critical element of any data lake, enriching the Customer 360 view and providing a strong foundation for analytics and insights.
- Generally, data lakes are more cost-effective for storing massive amounts of data compared to traditional databases, making them 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 refreshed our understanding of data lakes, let’s dive into how data lakehouses build upon the concept and offer even greater capabilities for your Salesforce environment.
Introducing Data Lakehouses: The Next Evolution
What is a Data Lakehouse?
A data lakehouse is a modern data architecture that combines the best aspects of both data lakes and data warehouses. It offers a cost-effective, flexible, and high-performance solution that can handle a variety of data management needs. This evolved approach allows you to optimize machine learning, business intelligence, and predictive analytics, giving you more control and versatility over your data.
By blending the flexibility of data lakes with the performance and structure of data warehouses, data lakehouses allow Salesforce Admins to better manage data while still leveraging the power of advanced analytics tools.
Data Lakehouse vs. Data Lake vs. Data Warehouse
Even though data lakehouses are designed as a blend between a data lake and a data warehouse, it’s important for Salesforce Admins to understand the key differences. This knowledge helps you select the best data strategy for your organization’s customer data.
Feature | Data Lake | Data Warehouse | Data Lakehouse |
---|---|---|---|
Use Cases | Data archiving, backup storage, basic analytics | BI reporting, operational analytics | Near real-time insights, advanced analytics, cross-system reporting |
Integration with Salesforce | Requires custom ETL | Requires ETL, limited flexibility | Direct integration; supports near real-time BI tools |
Schema Management | Flexible (schema-on-read) | Rigid (schema-on-write) | Flexible with structure (schema-on-write) |
Performance for Queries | Slower, requires optimization for analytics | High, optimized for structured queries | High, optimized for queries and advanced analytics |
Flexibility and Scalability | High flexibility for storing various data types | Less flexible, optimized for structured data only | Combines flexibility with high performance for structured and unstructured data |
Cost Efficiency | Low-cost for large, raw data | Higher costs due to structured data storage | Cost-effective balance of storage and performance |
Data lakehouses offer the best balance of flexibility, scalability, and performance, making them ideal for organizations that require near real-time insights and advanced analytics capabilities.
How Does a Data Lakehouse Work?
At its core, a data lakehouse is a hybrid approach that combines the benefits of both data lakes and data warehouses, enabling organizations to experience the best of both worlds. Key features of a data lakehouse include:
- Data management functionality: A data lakehouse can apply schema management, enforce data governance, and support ETL processes and data cleansing for efficient data operations.
- ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transaction support: This ensures data consistency even when multiple users are updating, deleting, reading, or writing data simultaneously.
- Unified data storage: It accommodates diverse data types and workloads, making it easier to handle structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
- High-performance query engine: Optimized for advanced analytics and fast queries, reducing latency and enhancing data operations like real-time analytics.
- Seamless integration with BI tools: Popular tools like Tableau, Salesforce Data Cloud, CRM Analytics, and AWS QuickSight connect easily with a data lakehouse, simplifying data-driven decision-making across multiple platforms.
With a data lakehouse, you can fully leverage Salesforce data to create a comprehensive Customer 360 view, allowing you to run complex queries and generate advanced reports based on your entire Salesforce history.
How to Get a Data Lakehouse With GRAX
From data protection to data reuse, GRAX provides a seamless solution for managing your Salesforce data lifecycle. With the GRAX Data Lakehouse, you have an all-in-one solution for reporting, training, and acting on your Salesforce history. GRAX makes it easy for Salesforce Admins to integrate data lakehouses into their workflow, allowing for faster adaptation and better focus on answering business questions instead of managing complex data operations.
The GRAX Data Lakehouse combines the flexibility of a data lake with the performance of a data warehouse, offering a unified platform for storing and managing your data. Key features include:
- One-click deployment: Deploy a data lakehouse quickly, without the usual complexity.
- Same-day data availability: Ensure data is ready for advanced analytics immediately.
- Lightning-fast query results: Speed up exploration and reporting on your historical Salesforce data.
- Unlimited data replay: Access your full history without making additional Salesforce API calls.
- Automatic schema management: Handle schema changes with ease, capturing all historical data.
- Maximized data reuse: Use your data across any industry-standard BI tools without needing custom integrations.
For Salesforce Admins, investing in a data lakehouse not only protects your data but also helps you unlock its full potential—driving innovation, improving operational efficiency, and achieving your business goals faster.
Summary
Data lakehouses have emerged as a powerful solution for organizations seeking to streamline data management and accelerate data-driven decision-making. With the ability to seamlessly integrate Salesforce data and provide advanced analytics capabilities, a data lakehouse is an ideal solution for improving your organization’s data culture.
To stay ahead in today’s competitive landscape, Salesforce Admins must understand how data lakehouses work and how they can optimize their data strategy. With a data lakehouse, you can ensure that your organization remains agile, innovative, and data-centric for years to come.
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