Let the sun shine through! The cloud in data warehousing skies is finally clearing as Dr. Barry Devlin builds the architectural and systems foundations for data lakehouse, data fabric, and data mesh, as well as the base cloud data warehouse. The past five years has seen an explosion of innovation and new technical forms as cloud data warehousing has gone mainstream. But confusion has grown too. After all, the business needs are largely unchanged. So, why are there so many options and approaches? How do they differ? Which one may be the best choice? And why? In this first volume of a two-part series, Dr. Barry Devlin-a founder of the entire data warehousing industry-offers initial answers these questions. Drawing lessons from the long history of data warehousing, he defines an all-embracing architecture and draws specific architectural design patterns for each of these modern approaches. And he discusses the various choices and paths from current systems to the different cloud solutions. Volume II expands further on the architectural considerations and offers deeper dives into cloud data warehouse, data fabric, data lakehouse, and data mesh. It also offers an independent view of their strengths and weaknesses.