Best Practices for Medallion Architecture

The medallion architecture has become a standard pattern for organizing data in modern data lakes and warehouses. In this post, we share best practices from working with hundreds of data teams.

The medallion architecture organizes data into three layers: Bronze (raw data), Silver (cleaned and conformed), and Gold (business-ready aggregates). Each layer serves a specific purpose and has different quality guarantees.

Bronze layer best practices: Store data in its original format with minimal transformation. Add metadata columns for ingestion timestamp and source system. Use partitioning by ingestion date for efficient querying. Retain data for at least 90 days for debugging and reprocessing.

Silver layer best practices: Apply data quality rules and reject bad records. Conform data types and naming conventions across sources. Deduplicate records and handle slowly changing dimensions. Document all transformations in your data catalog.

Gold layer best practices: Design tables around specific business use cases. Pre-aggregate common queries for performance. Include clear metric definitions in column descriptions. Version your tables when making breaking changes.

Lucaro makes implementing medallion architecture easy with visual layer management, automated quality gates between layers, and built-in lineage tracking.