Microsoft have announced Azure Data Lake—a big-data repository for storing structured and semi-structure data in native formats.
Data lakes can contain single files exceeding many petabytes or huge numbers of small files, so are equally suited to processing transaction logs or receiving data from many disparate “internet of things” sensors.
As data lakes are compatible with the Hadoop file system they can be accessed using all your favourite big-data platforms—e.g. Hadoop, Spark, Storm, Kafka, HDInsight.
