Data Warehouse vs. Data Lake vs. Data Lakehouse

Data Type

Cost & Scale

Use Case

Examples

Data Warehouse Structured analytics

Structured only Tables, schemas, SQL-ready data

High cost, less flexible Compute-storage coupled pricing

BI & Reports Dashboards, KPIs, ad-hoc queries

Snowflake, Redshift BigQuery, Synapse Analytics

Data Lake Raw data reservoir

Any type (raw) JSON, CSV, images, logs, Parquet

Low cost, very scalable Object storage, pay-per-TB model

Storage & ML Data science, archival, exploration

S3, ADLS Gen2 GCS, Azure Blob Storage

Modern Choice

Data Lakehouse Best of both worlds

All types unified Delta / Iceberg tables + raw files

Balanced & scalable Open formats, decoupled compute

BI + ML + AI SQL analytics, notebooks, models

Databricks, Fabric Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi