A useful lakehouse is not a logo slide. It is object storage with deliberate prefixes, open tables with contracts, a catalog engines trust, and compute that can come and go.
Four layers that must stay honest
Storage layout, table format, catalog, and engines. Confuse any two and you rebuild the warehouse tax you meant to escape — only with more YAML.
Ownership beats tooling
Pick fewer moving parts and name who pages when compaction stalls or a namespace disappears. Architecture reviews that skip ownership are fiction.
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