The medallion architecture emerged as the data industry's answer to data lake chaos. Organizations had dumped vast amounts of raw data into cheap storage, creating impenetrable data swamps. The medallion's promise was elegant: three progressive layers—Bronze for raw data, Silver for cleaned data, Gold for
I talk to data professionals and they're frequently frustrated. For example spending three months migrating everything to Parquet files in their data lake. Clean, columnar, compressed. Beautiful. But now their real-time service team needs that same data, and now it's painfully slow because, well, scanning columns
