Medallion Architecture

Definitions

1. A data organization pattern with three layers: Bronze (raw ingestion, no transformation), Silver (cleaned, deduplicated, conformed), and Gold (aggregated, business-ready). Each layer increases data quality and decreases volume. Popularized by Databricks for lakehouse architectures.

   In plain English: Organizing data into three quality levels — raw, cleaned, and business-ready — like refining raw material into a finished product.

   Example: "Raw API responses land in the bronze layer, the silver layer normalizes timestamps and removes duplicates, and gold has the final dashboards."

Related Terms

• Webhook vs. Polling
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Circuit Breaker
• Binary
• EHR
• Event Sourcing
• Slowly Changing Dimension
• Idempotent Pipeline