GCP Cloud Digital Leader Practice Question

A data lake is designed to collect large volumes of diverse data-structured, semi-structured, and unstructured-in its native form. Storing the raw purchase records alongside images, clickstream logs, and social-media text in an inexpensive object store lets teams defer schema design until they know the analytical questions they need to answer. In contrast, an operational relational database is optimized for consistent transactional workloads and cannot efficiently hold unstructured files at scale. A data warehouse expects cleaned, curated, and largely structured data arranged for analytical queries, making it unsuitable for dumping raw binary or text files. An in-memory cache is intended for low-latency access to a small working set of data, not for long-term, large-scale storage.