Medallion Architecture 101: Building Data Pipelines That Don't Fall Apart

Medallion architecture is a modern data engineering approach, building upon Ralph Kimball's data warehousing principles. It uses Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers for data processing. Bronze ingests raw data, preserving its origin with metadata. Silver transforms and standardizes the raw data, applying business logic. Gold provides analytics-ready datasets, optimized for specific purposes like dashboards. This pattern simplifies data pipelines, improving data quality and maintainability. The core idea is separating concerns within distinct layers. The initial example uses clean vendor data with stable schemas. Bronze layers include file path, name, and ingested information. The Silver layer cleans the data, transforming data types. The goal is to ingest data and make it available while maintaining data quality and traceability. This architecture helps in debugging and testing of data pipelines.