Block vs. Object Storage: A Deep Dive Into the Foundation of Modern Data, and How the Lakehouse Made the Slow Option Fast

Short summary

Deep dive into block vs. object storage explaining why the analytics industry moved data onto the slowest storage (object storage like S3) yet got faster results. Covers the mechanical differences, honest comparisons across latency, throughput, scalability, durability, and cost, and how Parquet, Iceberg, and engines like Dremio neutralize object storage's latency weaknesses to enable interactive analytics on cheap, durable storage.

• •Object storage is 50-100x slower than block storage yet won for analytics workloads
• •File formats (Parquet), table formats (Iceberg), and query engines (Dremio) neutralize object storage latency weaknesses
• •Block storage remains essential for transactional databases needing sub-millisecond random I/O

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