Azure is a great cloud platform but its services have mostly terrible names and confusing, often heavily overlapping features between them. And so another one in this series of confusing services is Azure Data Lake. I have tried to make sense of this service and what it does! Azure Data Lake Azure Data Lake has two components, which are very tightly integrated: a. Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) b. Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) ADLA gives us the ability to run analytical jobs (query, extract, aggregate, transform output etc.) on data, which is stored in ADLS, in form of files. Below ‘temp’ is the name of ADLA account. As we can see ‘tempdl’ is the name of associated ADLS account, which acts as the data source for this ADLA account. As we can see below, the ‘tempdl’ has got following data stored in form of files. ADLA lets us query, transform and do other operations on this data using USQL (properietary language, a combination of SQL and C#) and save the result da