Video explainers

The data lakehouse, explained in under a minute each

Nine short animated explainers covering the ideas that come up first when teams move analytics onto a lakehouse — from why OLTP and OLAP split apart, through Parquet, table formats and catalogs, to semantic layers and agentic AI. There is no narration and no audio track at all: every point is on screen, so they read exactly the same muted, in a meeting, or embedded in your own docs.

  • 01 OLTP vs OLAP

    Why transactional systems store data by row, analytical systems store it by column, and the two workloads end up on separate infrastructure.

    • OLTP runs the business, a few rows at a time
    • OLAP answers questions about the business
    • The shapes conflict, so the systems split

  • 02 The Data Warehouse

    The warehouse gave analytics governed, modeled, ACID-backed tables. Its limits are format lock-in, structured data only, and a cost curve tied to one vendor's engine.

    • One governed place to ask questions
    • Structured data only, in someone else's format
    • Storage, compute and format bound together

  • 03 The Evolution to the Data Lakehouse

    Warehouse, then data lake, then lakehouse: the path from a closed governed store to open files on object storage that behave like real tables.

    • The warehouse: reliable, closed, expensive
    • The data lake: open and cheap, but not a table
    • A table format turns files into a table
    • Warehouse behaviour on storage you own

  • 04 Data Lakes and Apache Parquet

    Object storage is the cheap open substrate; Apache Parquet is the columnar file format — column chunks, encodings and footer statistics — that makes scanning it fast.

    • Object storage is cheap, durable and open
    • Parquet stores data by column, not by row
    • Footer statistics let engines skip data

  • 05 Open Table Formats

    A table format is the metadata layer that turns a directory of Parquet into a real table — and the three open ones each solve it a little differently.

    • A directory of Parquet is not a table
    • Metadata names the exact set of files
    • Database guarantees on open files
    • Same problem, three designs

  • 06 Catalogs and Apache Polaris

    A catalog holds the current pointer for every table and makes commits atomic. Apache Polaris is an open-source, vendor-neutral implementation of the Iceberg REST Catalog spec.

    • A catalog is the table's source of truth
    • The Iceberg REST Catalog is an open API
    • An open-source Iceberg REST catalog

  • 07 The Lakehouse and Agentic AI

    Agents query data without an analyst in the loop, which moves access control, definitions and auditability down to the table and the catalog.

    • Agents query data on their own
    • Permissions have to hold at the table
    • One copy, many engines, one meaning
    • Agents need context, not just access

  • 08 Semantic Layers

    A semantic layer holds the endorsed metrics, dimensions and joins every consumer resolves against. Apache Ossie (incubating) is the open standard for moving those definitions between tools.

    • Every tool redefines the same metric
    • One governed place for meaning
    • Definitions written in one vendor's dialect
    • An open standard for semantic interchange

  • 09 What Is Apache Arrow?

    Arrow is the in-memory counterpart to Parquet: one agreed columnar layout so systems can hand data to each other with no serialization step at all.

    • Every hop used to re-encode the data
    • One columnar layout, agreed in advance
    • Zero-copy interchange, vectorized execution

Silent by design — no narration, no music. Hover to preview, click to play, or download any MP4 and reuse it.