Metadata Systems for Data Lakes: Models and Features

Over the past decade, the data lake concept has emerged as an alternative to data warehouses for storing and analyzing big data. A data lake allows storing data without any predefined schema. Therefore, data querying and analysis depend on a metadata system that must be efficient and comprehensive. However, metadata management in data lakes remains a current issue and the criteria for evaluating its effectiveness are more or less nonexistent. In this paper, we introduce MEDAL, a generic, graph-based model for metadata management in data lakes. We also propose evaluation criteria for data lake metadata systems through a list of expected features. Eventually, we show that our approach is more comprehensive than existing metadata systems.