What is the medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold)?
mediumAnswer
- Data lakehouse pattern popularized by Databricks.
- Bronze: raw ingested data, immutable, append-only, minimal parsing.
- Silver: cleaned + conformed + deduplicated + typed.
- Gold: business-ready aggregates + ML features + reporting tables.
- Each layer transforms upward.
- Benefits: (1) reprocessability (start over from bronze).
- (2) separation of concerns.
- (3) different SLAs per layer.
- Standard modern data platform pattern.
Check yourself — multiple choice
- Random
- Databricks lakehouse: Bronze (raw immutable) → Silver (cleaned/typed) → Gold (business aggregates + ML features); reprocessable + separated + different SLAs
- Just metals
- Not real
Medallion: Bronze → Silver → Gold; standard lakehouse pattern.
#pipeline#infrastructure
Practise MLOps & Data Quality
215 interview questions in this topic.
Related questions
- Orchestration tools for ML pipelines — Airflow vs Prefect vs Dagster.
- Why partition ML training tables by date?
- What is an 'asset' in Dagster and why is it useful for ML?
- ETL vs ELT for ML data — which pattern wins?
- Metaflow — what and when to use it?
- What are common sources of data leakage in an ML pipeline?