The augmented medallion architecture - Platinum layer

The Platinum layer - Where the data is consumed

The main purpose of this layer is to enable data consumption by one or multiple data consumers (historically and most commonly reporting).

In this layer, everything is done to ensure optimized data consumption specific to the group of consumers.

The platinum layer contains multiple sub layers, one sub layer per consumer.

Each sub layer contains a fraction of the data available in the gold layer and can implement specific security restrictions.

Characteristics of the layer

• Focused on specific data consumption
  • The data contained in this layer is specific to some business cases, thus data is usually a subset of the complete Gold layer data
• Storage should be optimized for consumption
  • The data should be stored to be fully optimized for the consumer, with specific indexes on consumer selection
• Allowed Data Structures
  • Structured
• Granularity of data
  • The data can be detailed and/or aggregated
• Optimized for consumption
  • The data is stored to ensure an optimization of the consumption
    • In the case of reporting, the optimization focus should be on the response time of the customer facing UI
    • In the case of data push to a 3rd party application, the optimization focus should be on the duration of data push and stability of the process to target a 100% success rate on data push

Transformations applied

The transformations applied in this layer are usually very specific to the consumer needs.

Good practices

In this layer, the main focus is on the performance for the consumer. The goal should be to limit data to the actual needs of the consumer. An example of this is in the case of a monitoring to keep only the data actually displayed. So, if only the data from last year is displayed, all the data from 2 years ago can be removed from this layer.

This article is part of a series of article describing the augmented medallion architecture.