Medallion Architecture

Layered Data Design for Quality, Trust, and Scalability

At Digital Bricks, we implement the Medallion Architecture. This is a layered data design pattern that organizes your data workflows into bronze, silver, and gold stages. This approach creates a clear, governed path from raw ingestion to refined insights, supporting everything from basic reporting to advanced AI applications.

By applying this structure, we ensure your data is not only available, but clean, validated, and enterprise-grade.

Why Medallion Architecture Matters

Modern data platforms are complex—streaming, batch, AI pipelines, unstructured sources—and without a defined structure, they become brittle and chaotic. Medallion Architecture brings order, governance, and clarity by enforcing a progressive refinement model across your data lifecycle.

It allows you to:

• Isolate raw data safely, without risk to downstream systems
• Apply quality checks and transformations in a controlled way
• Serve AI, BI, and operational systems from a reliable gold layer
• Enable observability, rollback, and reprocessing at each stage
• Support DataOps and MLOps best practices

This framework is foundational for robust pipelines in Azure Data Lake, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, or Delta Lake environments.

We tailor Medallion Architecture deployments to your platform and pipeline requirements.

Bronze Layer — Raw Ingestion

We design ingestion pipelines to land raw, unvalidated data directly from your sources:

• Batch or streaming ingestion via Azure Data Factory, Event Hub, or Kafka
• Unaltered formats (CSV, JSON, Avro, Parquet)
• Metadata tagging for lineage and traceability
• Storage in partitioned directories or Delta tables with minimal schema enforcement

Bronze ensures data completeness and supports auditing, reprocessing, and versioning.

Silver Layer — Cleaned & Validated

In the silver layer, we apply data cleansing, transformations, and lightweight modeling:

• Data deduplication, type casting, and normalization
• Join logic across sources
• Rule-based validation and quality enforcement
• Feature extraction or contextual enrichment

Silver data is queryable and model-ready, often served to analysts and AI teams.

Gold Layer — Curated & Trusted

Gold represents the final, refined layer—fully reliable and ready for business consumption:

• Aggregated, business-aligned datasets
• Dimensional models or star schemas
• Datasets used by Power BI, dashboards, APIs, and AI pipelines
• Role-based access controls and reporting KPIs

Gold is the single source of truth for strategic decision-making and machine learning models.

We build on top of:

• Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
• Databricks (Delta Lake)
• Microsoft Fabric & Lakehouse Architecture
• Apache Spark / PySpark transformations
• Purview for governance
• Azure DevOps / CI-CD for pipeline automation

What You Get

• A fully implemented Medallion Architecture across your data platform
• Structured ETL/ELT pipelines from raw to curated
• Defined data quality and validation checkpoints
• Modular design for extensibility and reusability
• Integration-ready datasets for AI, BI, and external systems
• Documentation, metadata lineage, and monitoring

Why Digital Bricks?

We build data operating models that scale with your business. With deep experience in AI data preparation, Microsoft-native tools, and governance frameworks, we deliver Medallion Architectures that are clean, compliant, and ready for anything.

‍