🥉🥈🥇 Medallion Architecture: the standard for organizing data in a Lakehouse#
How is data organized in your company? If the answer is “however it ends up”, there’s a better way.
The medallion architecture is Azure Databricks’ recommended pattern for structuring data incrementally, improving quality layer by layer.
- 🥉 Bronze — Raw data as it arrives: uncleaned, unvalidated. Single source of truth, enables reprocessing and auditing. Consumed by data engineers.
- 🥈 Silver — Cleaned, deduplicated, and validated data. NULLs removed, schemas normalized, joins performed. Used by analysts and data scientists.
- 🥇 Gold — Highly aggregated and refined data, ready for dashboards, BI, and ML models. Consumed by executives, business analysts, and operational teams.
This approach guarantees atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) as data flows through each layer.
The result: reliable, traceable, and analysis-optimized data.
“Following the medallion architecture is a recommended practice, but not a requirement.” — Azure Databricks
🪄 Quick explanation#
Think of a juice factory:
- 🍎 Bronze = fresh fruit arriving from the farm (unwashed, unsorted)
- 🍹 Silver = washed, cut, and pitted fruit
- 🧃 Gold = bottled juice, ready to drink
Each stage adds quality to the product.
👉 In data, this process transforms chaotic information into actionable business knowledge.
More information at the link 👇
Also published on LinkedIn.
