Anyone have experience with data lakes

[Brad Burlingham]

I'm hoping to setup api from all of our dealerships into a datalake so that we can create our own reporting. Does anyone have any suggestions on vendors or overall advice?

First stage is to use it to develop marketing dashboards to evaluate trends, performance, kpi etc. next step would be to use it with a cdp to develop audiences etc.

 

[CarlAutofusion]

Check out snowflake.com. It can get expensive if you're running a ton of stuff through it but its' pretty good and they have an API if you need to do anything custom. It can also look for patterns and trends in the data.

 

[Ryan Everson]

Snowflake is still the industry leader by far, but ClickHouse is quickly stealing market share as a more innovative solution:
Fast Open-Source OLAP DBMS - ClickHouse

Getting marketing data like GA4 into a data warehouse can sometimes be easier with Google BigQuery, but tools like Supermetrics can help load that data into Snowflake as well.

For reporting, I would highly suggest looking into Sigma. We’re in the process of moving off Tableau and Google Data / Looker Studio and over to Sigma:
Sigma. Unified AI apps and analytics

But honestly, the most challenging piece is going to be setting up the pipelines to extract data out of your DMS, CRM, etc because as I’m sure you already know, automotive still tends to be a pretty walled off garden.

 

[CarlAutofusion]

Ryan is right that the most time-consuming/expensive part will be getting the data pipelines set up. Some vendors won't do it unless there's a bit of arm twisting. Others will charge for the access.