Medallion Architecture
Best practices for managing bronze, silver, and gold
I have been asked many of my students about medallion architecture. Why implement this kind of approach? What are the benefits? And because of this, I decided to write a little bit about my experiences with this technology.
With the increase need for data in the last years, a big need from business areas is to have access to data ready to use. We can also include the pressure of Self-Service BI solutions, which gives power to the users to build their own dashboards, and visual solutions, used to create dashboards, more and more user friendly like PowerBI and Tableau where the user only needs access to the data and can design whatever they want with a very user-friendly interface, and finally the datalakes/lakehouses concepts that create unique places to store all the data, making it easier to integrate and enrich whatever is the data you are exploring.
A medallion architecture is a data design pattern used to logically organize data in a lakehouse, with the goal of incrementally and progressively improving the structure and quality of data as it flows through each layer of the architecture (from Bronze ⇒ Silver ⇒ Gold layer tables). Medallion architectures are sometimes also referred to as “multi-hop” architectures.
