George Woods

Sr. Cloud Solution Architect - Corporate Team at Microsoft



Create a Data Lakehouse in ADLS written by ChatGPT

22 Mar 2023

With all of the talk around ChatGPT, I thought it would be fun to ask it about using an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 as a Data LakeHouse and also have it explain the broze, silver, gold layers. Ultimately, I think it did pretty well. Let me know your thoughts.

This was my question

can you write a blog post about the bronze, silver gold layers in a azure data lake gen 2 being used as a data lakehouse

This was what ChatGPT wrote.

If you are looking for a way to store and analyze large amounts of data in Azure, you might want to consider using Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2) as your data lakehouse solution. A data lakehouse is a hybrid architecture that combines the best features of a data lake and a data warehouse. It allows you to store both structured and unstructured data in one place, while also providing capabilities for data governance, security, performance, and scalability.

One of the key benefits of using ADLS Gen2 as your data lakehouse is that it supports a hierarchical namespace that organizes your data into directories and files. This feature enables you to use familiar file system operations such as rename or delete on your data sets without affecting their underlying storage blobs. It also improves the performance of directory management operations by reducing the number of transactions required.

Another benefit of using ADLS Gen2 as your data lakehouse is that it supports multiple access methods and integrations with various Azure services. You can use Hadoop compatible access (ABFS driver) to read and write data from any Apache Hadoop environment such as Azure HDInsight, Azure Databricks, or Azure Synapse Analytics. You can also use Blob storage APIs or SDKs to access your data from any application or tool that supports Blob storage. Additionally, you can leverage services such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Share, or Azure Purview to ingest, share, or catalog your data.

To optimize your data lakehouse design with ADLS Gen2, you can follow some best practices such as:

  • Use premium performance accounts for low latency and high throughput workloads
  • Structure your data sets according to their usage patterns and access frequency
  • Use different tiers (hot/cool/archive) to balance between performance and cost
  • Use partitioning and file formats that support pushdown predicates and column pruning
  • Use ACLs and POSIX permissions to enforce granular security policies on directories and files

One common pattern for structuring your data sets in ADLS Gen2 is to use three layers: bronze, silver, and gold. The bronze layer contains raw or unprocessed data that is ingested from various sources. The silver layer contains cleansed or transformed data that is ready for analysis. The gold layer contains aggregated or enriched data that provides business insights.

The following diagram illustrates this pattern: it did recommend a link for an image that does not exists. see below

image

By using this pattern, you can achieve several benefits such as:

  • Separating ingestion from consumption processes
  • Reducing duplication and redundancy of data
  • Improving quality and consistency of data
  • Facilitating governance and compliance of data

In conclusion, ADLS Gen2 is a powerful platform for building enterprise-grade data lakehouses on Azure. It offers a rich set of features that enable you to store and analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data with ease. By following some best practices such as using hierarchical namespaces, multiple access methods, different tiers, partitioning/file formats, and security permissions/ACLs , you can optimize your design for performance, cost-efficiency ,and security.