The Medallion Architecture
Wrangling Your Data with the Medallion Architecture
Smart Data staff
Most mid-market data lives in a CRM, an ERP and a dozen SaaS tools that were never brought together. Point a report or a model at that and it returns confident answers that may well be wrong. The medallion pattern gives every source one place to land, get cleaned and be served, so the numbers can be trusted.
- 1
Fix the foundation before the AI
A clean Gold layer sets the ceiling on every report and every answer.
- 2
The pattern is simple
Bronze preserves, Silver creates trust, Gold serves.
- 3
Platform choice is a set of trade-offs
Match Microsoft Fabric, Databricks or Snowflake to the team and budget you actually have.
A 40-minute session with questions, for teams who are still trying to build the reports their departments need, and now get asked about AI too.
Five problems most teams know
- Three reports, three different answers.
- The best analysts spend their days fixing spreadsheets.
- Every new report is another integration project.
- The report is wrong, and nobody can rebuild what happened.
- One system change, and everything downstream breaks.
The pattern
Bronze lands every source exactly as it arrived, so nothing is lost and the platform can always be rebuilt. Silver cleans, deduplicates and joins it into business entities teams can trust and reuse. Gold shapes it into the marts, KPIs and features that dashboards and AI actually use. Each layer has one job, and each of the five problems gets a place to be solved.
The platform decision
The same blueprint runs on Microsoft Fabric, Databricks or Snowflake, and none of them is a one-way door: the design lets you change engines layer by layer. The talk walks through the trade-offs and follows the pattern start to finish on Microsoft Fabric.
Where to start
- Inventory your top three use cases.
- Map the sources that feed them into Bronze.
- Pick one and promote it end to end, through Silver to Gold.
- Choose the compute engine when the scope is real, not before.
Our booth runs a live Microsoft Fabric dashboard of Dayton traffic built the same way.