Many of my blogs promote the business benefits of the data lake, both from a “save me more money” as well as the “make me more money” perspectives. But I fear that I’m making this thing called the data lake sound like a “silver bullet[1]” – just drop the data into the data lake and everything magically works. But much like in the world of data warehousing, there is significant work that needs to be done under the covers – in areas such as metadata management, data governance and security – to ensure that the data lake will perform for a business in a production environment. Many of the processes and techniques we learned in the data warehouse will benefit us here, though there are many new tools to be aware of that can help us in the operationalization task.