Lakehouse architecture, retrieval systems, and the parts of data engineering that resist being tidied up.
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Table truth in the lakehouse has converged on one protocol. Everything above it has not, and the reason is a credential. A layer model for the parts that still differ, where Databricks, Snowflake and IBM actually stand in August 2026, and the question nobody puts in the diagram.
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The lakehouse catalogs have absorbed the glossary, the classification, the lineage and the marketplace. So what is an enterprise governance catalog for now — and why does none of them speak the one protocol the market converged on?
Written by David Leconte. Corrections and correspondence: linkedin.com/in/davidleconte.
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© 2026 David Leconte. All rights reserved.