13 Comments
User's avatar
Scott Haines's avatar

We talk about the “tin layer” in Delta Lake: The Definitive Guide. It’s for landing zone, pre-bronze data. Essentially where things land before being converted to Delta (or really Iceberg or any future table format)

Expand full comment
Qiuzhuang Lian's avatar

Is not this feature store

Expand full comment
Ananth Packkildurai's avatar

Not all features are real-time in nature. Real-time serving is one part, but real-time ingestion as a platform is what distinguishes the platinum layer from a feature store.

Expand full comment
ksCaesar's avatar

Ananth, your description of the Platinum layer — especially its focus on data driving actions, embedded intelligence, and serving applications/ML models — strongly resonates with the concept of Reverse ETL.

Was this similarity an intentional design philosophy, or do you see key distinctions between the two (Reverse ETL vs Platinum layer )?

Expand full comment
Ananth Packkildurai's avatar

Reverse ETL often focuses on activating a specific business function, while the platinum layer focuses on the platform aspect of real-time data.

Expand full comment
Radek Ouhel's avatar

Great article, just not sure why the emphasis on "aggregates" in the Gold - I presume it means that data is integrated from multiple sources, bronze & silver datasets. Not that it needs to be aggregated. Best reporting datasets are often ones with row level detail in my view.

Also - I'd say the core strength and purpose of Gold is that it's aligned and modelled to fit a specific business process or use case (e.g. 2 Gold layers will serve different use cases whilst re-using 80% of the Silver datasets).

Expand full comment
Ananth Packkildurai's avatar

The granularity of the facts can vary based on the use cases, but they are largely aggregated and refined.

Expand full comment
Nagarjuna c's avatar

Nice Ananth. Indded we need platinum and can be designed based on the specific usecase

Expand full comment
Abayomi's avatar

Great Post! Thanks for sharing.

Expand full comment
Hugo Lu's avatar

Awesome post

Expand full comment
Zubair Jaleel's avatar

Good article. How do you orchestrate platinum layer?

Expand full comment
Yeshwanth LN's avatar

in the last diagram , you have mentioned some of the platforms for the storage in gold , which are not correct i think.

Expand full comment
Gabriele C's avatar

Real time analytics cannot sit on top of layers that are run on low frequency cronjobs which are typically used for business analytics. Medallion is typically realised with batch jobs. Forcing streaming at the end of a batch sequence can be an anti-pattern.

Expand full comment