A data warehouse is a structured environment designed for fast analytics using business intelligence (BI) tools. It stores curated, organized data optimized for dashboards, reporting, and compliance.
In contrast, a data lake allows you to store raw data—structured, semi-structured, or unstructured—such as logs, text files, or multimedia. It offers greater flexibility for exploration, data science, and varied workloads.
Lakehouse architectures combine the scalability and openness of a data lake with the governance, performance, and reliability of a warehouse—making it possible to run advanced analytics and AI models from a unified platform.