An Enterprise Data Lake journey starts first with getting valuable data into the lake. There are several mechanisms to ingest data into a Data Lake powered by HDInsight primarily: HDFS transfer, Azure PowerShell, Azure tools with a user interface, and Sqoop. In order to make a Data Lake easy to consume, it is important to have a managed ingestion process with governance and structure of the various directories.

HCatalog provides a shared metastore that can be used by various tools in Hadoop, namely, Hive, Pig, and MapReduce. This ensures that the structural information is defined once and leveraged by these tools. In the next chapter, we will look into the transformation of the data that we just ingested.