Big data companies Alation Inc. and Paxata Inc. say they’re teaming up to help enterprises navigate their way through so-called “data lakes” more easily.

Data lakes are storage repositories that hold vast amounts of raw data in its native format until it’s needed. Whereas a hierarchical data warehouse stores data in files or folders, a data lake uses a flat architecture to store its data.

Alation and Paxata say their new product integration is necessary because many of their customers are still struggling to obtain information and insights from their data lakes. “Business users and analysts simply can’t find, trust, or efficiently prepare the necessary data assets,” Aaron Kalb, head of product, Alation, said in a statement.

To remedy this, the two companies have created a way for users to quickly discover and profile their data in both raw and compressed formats, no matter if that data is housed on-premises or in the cloud. The integration also ensures users can establish trust in the data they’re using, the companies said.

“Our partnership with Paxata empowers users with an easy way to both access and understand trustworthy data, regardless of their technical skills,” Kalb added. “Now, users can open any file in the data lake — whether it’s raw or compressed, JSON, Parquet, or Avro — and see what’s inside.”

Self-service data preparation in data lakes requires that users can trust the data they’re using and understand its nuances as its transformed from raw files into structures, algorithms, queries and dashboards and reports, the companies said. As such, their new offering provides greater context on how data is ingested and prepared at each stage of the pipeline. This data can then be used to glean new business insights.

As part of the integration, Alation and Paxata are touting a new “click to profile” data discovery feature that helps them understand and establish trust in raw data files. Customers use the Alation Data Catalog to identify trusted data assets, then push these into Paxata’s Self-service Data Prep Application, which automatically profiles and prepares that data for analysis.

“It has become clear that there is a powerful synergy between data preparation and data cataloging for achieving the information needs of all business consumers,” said Nenshad Bardoliwalla, cofounder and chief product officer at Paxata.

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