Nonsense on parade

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Tuesday 13th January 2026

This GigaOm report is a classic vendor-sponsored benchmark. Fivetran picked the competitors and shaped the test scope. GigaOm (as explicitly disclosed) executed it “as-is” with “compatible configurations subject to judgment.” It’s marketing material presented as independent research. It has several structural weaknesses. These weaknesses make the 77–95% cost savings claim highly misleading for most real organisations.

1. It only measures ingestion compute, not true TCO.

The report repeatedly calls itself a “TCO report,” but it explicitly excludes:

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Hype and Misleading Claims Surrounding Data Lakehouses

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Segovia, 20th Devember 2025

A data lakehouse is marketed as a hybrid architecture. It combines the low-cost, flexible storage of data lakes. These lakes handle raw, unstructured data at scale. It also offers the structured querying, performance, and ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transactional capabilities of data warehouses. Vendors like Databricks coined the term. Snowflake and others promote it as a platform for analytics. It serves AI and machine learning needs. This approach eliminates data silos and reduces redundant copies. It enables cost-effective scaling through open standards and decoupled storage and compute models. However, much of this is hype driven by vendor marketing. Vendors promote it as an evolution from “data swamps” (unmanaged data lakes) and rigid warehouses.