What is Bronze-Silver-Gold Layers

Definition

The bronze-silver-gold layers are the tiers of the medallion architecture, where bronze holds raw ingested data, silver holds cleaned and conformed data, and gold holds curated, business-ready datasets, refining data progressively toward analytics-ready quality.

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Separate raw, cleaned, and business-ready data into clear tiers
Make refinement, lineage, and reprocessing easy to manage
Provide trustworthy gold datasets ready for reporting
Allow each layer to be rebuilt independently from the one before

Real World Example

A retailer lands raw transactions in bronze, deduplicates and standardises them in silver, and builds aggregated sales-by-region tables in gold, so dashboards read clean gold data with a clear path back to source.

FAQs

What does each layer hold?

Bronze holds raw ingested data, silver holds cleaned and conformed data, and gold holds curated, business-ready datasets.

Why use a layered approach?

It separates concerns, making data refinement, quality, and lineage clear and manageable from raw to ready.

Is this the same as medallion architecture?

Yes, bronze-silver-gold is the layering pattern at the heart of the medallion architecture.