First statement: No WareHouse, No Lake. thats New Data-Model
Transaction support: In an enterprise lakehouse many data pipelines will often be reading and writing data concurrently. Support for ACID transactions ensures that as multiple parties concurrently read or write data, typically using SQL.
Schema enforcement and governance: The Lakehouse should have a way to support schema enforcement and evolution, supporting DW schema paradigms such as star/snowflake-schemas. The system should be able to reason about data integrity, and it should have robust governance and auditing mechanisms.
BI support: Lakehouses enable using BI tools directly on the source data. This reduces staleness and improves recency, reduces latency, and lowers the cost of having to operationalize two copies of the data in both a data lake and a warehouse.
Storage is decoupled from compute: In practice this means storage and compute use separate clusters, thus these systems are able to scale to many more concurrent users and larger data sizes. Some modern data warehouses also have this property.
Openness: The storage formats they use are open and standardized, such as Parquet, and they provide an API so a variety of tools and engines, including machine learning and Python/R libraries, can efficiently access the data directly.
Support for diverse data types ranging from unstructured to structured data: The lakehouse can be used to store, refine, analyze, and access data types needed for many new data applications, including images, video, audio, semi-structured data, and text.
Support for diverse workloads: including data science, machine learning, and SQL and analytics. Multiple tools might be needed to support all these workloads but they all rely on the same data repository.
End-to-end streaming: Real-time reports are the norm in many enterprises. Support for streaming eliminates the need for separate systems dedicated to serving real-time data applications.
These are the key attributes of lakehouses. Enterprise grade systems require additional features. Tools for security and access control are basic requirements. Data governance capabilities including auditing, retention, and lineage have become essential particularly in light of recent privacy regulations. Tools that enable data discovery such as data catalogs and data usage metrics are also needed. With a lakehouse, such enterprise features only need to be implemented, tested, and administered for a single system.