Medallion Architecture

The medallion architecture is a convention for organising a lakehouse into three layers: bronze holds data raw and immutable, exactly as ingested; silver holds it cleaned, typed, deduplicated, and conformed; gold holds modelled, business-ready tables that consumers actually query. Trust increases left to right, and every downstream table can be rebuilt by replaying from bronze.

Its value is shared vocabulary and provenance; its danger is false completeness — the layers say nothing about modelling, ownership, or definitions, which is where analytics actually fails. Treat the three layers as a default to adapt (collapse them for clean sources, add stages for complex ones), not a law.

Go deeper: The Medallion Architecture, Reconsidered