Data warehouses were designed in the days when closed and proprietary was the right choice for data storage. But the cloud era requires a less cumbersome, open technology that can cope with real-time streaming access.

“There’s so much new data, so many new use cases and every company wants to be data-driven,” said Tomer Shiran (pictured), co-founder and chief product officer at Dremio Corp. “They all want to democratize data within the organization. But … that’s very hard if you have to constantly move data around.”

Shiran spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the evolution of data architectures, and the differences between a data lakehouse, a data lake and a data warehouse. (* Disclosure below.)

Dremio democratizes data access

Data lakes and data warehouses both have benefits. Warehouses work best for high-performance business intelligence workloads, while data lakes give the flexibility to use different processing engines and keep data in your own account in open formats, according to Shiran. A data lakehouse combines these in a “best of both worlds” scenario, bringing a new, open data architecture into the mix.

With a data lakehouse, the data is its own tier stored in open formats. This switches the paradigm where instead of bringing data to the engine, as with a data warehouse, the engine comes to the data.

“All of a sudden you can start to take advantage of all this innovation that’s happening on the same set of data without having to copy and move it around,” Shiran said. “[Amazon] S3 effectively becomes the new data warehouse if you will.”

This saves money, reduces lock-in, and improves security and governance. It is also a huge step toward democratizing data access. This has been a key focus for Dremio, according to Shiran, as it is something that the next generation of employees, who often arrive at the workplace having learned SQL at school, expect.

“They don’t want a report on their desk printed out every Monday morning. They want access to the database,” Shiran stated. And if they don’t get it, they get frustrated.

Dremio makes the database accessible across the company, with production BI workloads even able to run on the lake house, according to Shiran.

“Now you have the ability to expose data to your users within the company and make it very self-service. They can query any data at any time and get a fast response time; that’s what they need,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Dremio Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dremio nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE