Medallion Architecture: Designing Bronze, Silver, and Gold Layers

Before you write a single transformation, you need a blueprint.

The Medallion Architecture is the design pattern used by data teams worldwide to organize data in a Lakehouse. It's the blueprint Databricks themselves recommend, and it's the foundation of everything we'll build in the final article of this series.

Understanding it deeply — not just the names of the layers, but why they exist — is what separates pipelines that scale from pipelines that become a maintenance nightmare six months later.

What is the Medallion Architecture?

The Medallion Architecture organizes data into three progressive layers, each named after a metal:

Raw Sources ↓ 🥉 BRONZE — Raw data, exactly as received ↓ 🥈 SILVER — Cleaned, validated, enriched data ↓ 🥇 GOLD — Aggregated, business-ready data ↓ Consumers (BI tools, ML models, APIs)

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Each layer has a clear purpose.…