What is Medallion Architecture

Medallion Architecture, proposed by Databricks, enhances data management within a data lakehouse framework. It aligns with the principles of Data as a Product (DaaP) and multi-layered data processing, creating a single source of truth for organizations. The architecture structures data into multiple layers—bronze, silver, and gold—each playing a specific role in progressively improving data quality and readiness for analysis.

Structure of Medallion Architecture

Medallion Architecture employs a multi-tiered approach to data management, consisting of bronze, silver, and gold layers. Each layer plays a crucial role in the data transformation process, ensuring data quality and readiness for analysis:

🥉Bronze Layer

The bronze layer is the first layer in the Medallion Architecture and serves as the landing zone for all data, whether structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. This data is stored in its original format without any modifications. The primary goal at this stage is to capture data as-is, preserving its integrity and providing a foundation for subsequent transformations.

🥈Silver Layer

The silver layer is the second stage where data undergoes validation and refinement. Typical activities in this layer include combining and merging data, enforcing data validation rules, removing nulls, and deduplicating. The silver layer acts as a central repository where data is stored in a consistent format, making it accessible to multiple teams. This ensures that the data is clean and structured, ready to be further refined and modeled in the gold layer.

🥇Gold Layer

The gold layer is the final stage in the Medallion Architecture, where data is enriched and aligned with specific business and analytics needs. This could involve aggregating data to a particular granularity (e.g., daily or hourly) or enriching it with external information. At this stage, the data is optimized for use by downstream teams, including analytics, data science, or MLOps. The gold layer ensures that data is fully refined, providing valuable insights for strategic decision-making.

Customizing Your Medallion Architecture

The Medallion Architecture is inherently flexible and can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your organization. Depending on your use case, you might introduce additional layers, such as:

• Raw Layer: For landing data in a specific format before it is transformed into the bronze layer.

• Platinum Layer: For data that has been further refined and enriched for a specific use case.

Regardless of the names and number of layers, the key is to adapt the Medallion Architecture to fit your organization's requirements, ensuring efficient data management and high data quality.