Member-only story
Medallion Architecture
The Gold Standard for Scalable Data Pipelines
In the modern data ecosystem, organizations constantly struggle with ingesting massive volumes of data from varied sources, cleaning and transforming it, and making it accessible for analytics, machine learning, and business intelligence. The Medallion Architecture has emerged as a powerful design pattern to tackle this complexity, offering a structured, scalable, and maintainable approach to building data lakes and lakehouses.
What is the Medallion Architecture?
Medallion Architecture is a layered data design paradigm that organizes data into three logical layers: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Each layer represents a stage in the data refinement pipeline:
- Bronze Layer: Raw, unfiltered, ingested data
- Silver Layer: Cleansed and conformed data
- Gold Layer: Aggregated, curated data ready for analytics and reporting
This architecture supports modularity, data quality, governance, and traceability. It is commonly implemented in modern data platforms like Databricks Lakehouse, but the principles are technology-agnostic.
