Concepts Data Professionals Need to Know in 2025: Part 1 | by Sarah Lea | January, 2025

From Data Lakehouses to Event-Driven Architecture – Master 12 data concepts and turn them into simple projects to stay ahead of IT.

When I scroll through YouTube or LinkedIn and see topics like RAG, Agents or Quantum Computing, I sometimes have a sad feeling about following these new trends as a data scientist.

But when I think at that time about the topics that my clients deal with every day as a Salesforce Consultant or as a Data Scientist at a university, the challenges often seem more obvious: examples to access data faster, better data quality or to improve the technical skills of employees. Important problems are often not permanent and can often be simplified. That is the focus of this and the next article:

I have compiled 12 words that you will surely meet as a data engineer, data scientist and data analyst in 2025. Why are they important? What are the challenges? And how can you use them in a small project?

So – Let's dive in.

Table of Contents
1 – Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Data Lakehouse
2 – Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform
3 — Preparing data storage
4 – Big data technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka
5 — How data integration becomes powerful in real time: ETL, ELT and Zero-ETL
6 – Even-Driven Architecture (EDA)
Term 7–12 in part 2: Data Queue & XAI, Gen AI, Agent AI, Inference Time Compute, Near…