I picked up a copy of this book when I realized I needed to upskill in the field of building data lakehouses, given that’s the direction the team I’m on is heading towards. I don’t know too much about how data lakehouses work, and I thought this book would help me out here.
LOL nope. I still don’t really know how data lakehouses work. Most of what I’ve gleaned is that a data lakehouse is a data warehouse that sits on top of a data lake. Otherwise, it’s a lot of fluff, going off in different directions to try and cover too many topics in an abstract yet sort-of prescriptive kind of way.
I think it’s really hard to write authoritatively about data warehousing. I recognize the writing style from my older roadmapping documents a few months ago before internalizing (at least for ICs) strategy should be in service of implementation. Given that, I would have appreciated if Bill had written about an abstract data lakehouse architecture in action (e.g. for an e-commerce store selling product $PRODUCT). I think on one hand, the lack of detail (because by the time most companies put together a data team, the engineering stack is so complex that a data warehouse is a really custom piece of architecture) lends itself to job security. At the same time, the lack of standardization for data warehousing makes it difficult to compare and contrast what is or should be an industry best practice, and makes it less “engineer-y” than I would personally like.
I’ll see if there’s any other books on data warehousing to read, but if not, there might be a great opportunity to write one up on how a data warehouse would proceed in practice.