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Data Lake Formation:What is Data Lake Formation (DLF) 1.0?

Last Updated:Feb 27, 2026

Data Lake Formation (DLF) 1.0 is a fully managed service for building cloud-based data lakes and data lakehouses. DLF provides unified metadata management, unified permission and security management, and one-click data exploration to integrate with multiple compute engines and break down data silos.

Pricing

ItemBilling modelFree tier
Metadata managementPay-as-you-goFirst 1 million stored metadata objects per month
API requestsFirst 1 million API requests per month
Data explorationFree public previewNot billed
Permission managementFree public previewNot billed
Lake managementFree public previewNot billed

Additional metadata objects and API requests beyond the free tier are charged. For more information, see Billing.

Architecture

Data Catalog

View and manage the Data Catalog in the data lake through the console.

Database tables and functions

View and manage database tables and functions in the data lake through the console. The CreateDatabase and CreateTable APIs support metadata operations and integration with third-party application services. DLF supports multi-version management and can automatically generate metadata through metadata extraction.

Data permission management

Data permission management controls data access at the lake level to protect data security. Permissions are supported at five levels of granularity: data catalog, database, data table, data column, and function.

Data lake management

Data lake management provides analysis and optimization suggestions for data storage in the lake, supports data lifecycle management, helps optimize usage costs, and simplifies data O&M.

Data exploration

Data exploration provides one-click querying and analysis with Spark 3.0 SQL syntax. Features include saving historical queries, previewing data, exporting results, and generating TPC-DS test datasets with one click.

Scenarios

Build a cloud-based data lake

Integrate DLF with E-MapReduce and Object Storage Service (OSS) to quickly build a cloud-based data lake.

Build a data lakehouse architecture

Integrate DLF with MaxCompute, DataWorks, and E-MapReduce to quickly build a data lakehouse architecture.

Build a fully managed data lakehouse architecture

Integrate DLF with Databricks and OSS to build a fully managed data lakehouse architecture on the cloud.

Analyze data in OSS

Use metadata extraction and data exploration to quickly analyze and explore structured and semi-structured data in OSS.