What is Medallion Architecture

Definition

The medallion architecture is a data design pattern that organises a lakehouse into progressive quality layers, bronze for raw ingested data, silver for cleaned and conformed data, and gold for curated, business-ready datasets, so data is refined step by step toward analytics.

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Organises data into clear bronze, silver, and gold quality stages
Separates raw, cleaned, and business-ready data for maintainability
Makes lineage and reprocessing straightforward layer by layer
Provides curated gold tables ready for reporting and analytics

Real World Example

A Fabric team ingests raw files into a bronze layer, cleans and conforms them in silver, and builds aggregated, business-ready tables in gold, so each report draws from trustworthy gold data with a clear path back to the source.

FAQs

What are the medallion layers?

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

Why use a medallion architecture?

It brings structure and clarity to refinement, separating concerns so data quality and lineage are easy to manage.

Where is medallion architecture used?

It is widely used in lakehouse platforms like Fabric and Databricks to organise progressive data refinement.