Building Robust ETL with Medallion Architecture

Introduction

In the world of data engineering, one question comes up repeatedly: how do we organize our data pipelines to be both maintainable and scalable? At Honeycomb Studio, we've found that medallion architecture provides an elegant solution to this challenge, particularly for arts and cultural institutions managing complex data from ticketing systems, POS platforms, and donor databases.

What is Medallion Architecture?

Medallion architecture organizes your data warehouse into three progressive layers—bronze, silver, and gold—each serving a specific purpose in the data transformation journey.

Bronze Layer: Raw Data Ingestion
The bronze layer is your landing zone. Here, we ingest data exactly as it comes from source systems like Tessitura, NCR Counterpoint, or Sodexo. No transformations, no cleaning—just raw, timestamped data. This approach gives you a complete audit trail and the ability to replay transformations if business logic changes.

Silver Layer: Cleaned and Conformed
In the silver layer, we apply data quality rules, standardize formats, and resolve inconsistencies. For example, if your Tessitura system records customer names differently than your POS system, we harmonize those formats here. This is where duplicate records get deduplicated and data types get standardized.

Gold Layer: Business-Ready Analytics
The gold layer contains aggregated, denormalized tables optimized for specific business use cases. This might be a customer 360 view combining ticket purchases, concessions spending, and membership data—ready for your marketing team to use without any SQL knowledge required.

Why This Matters for Cultural Institutions

Museums, theaters, and philharmonics have unique data challenges. You're dealing with membership systems, ticketing platforms, retail operations, and food service—often from different vendors with incompatible data formats. Medallion architecture lets us:

• Maintain data lineage: Every transformation is traceable back to the source
• Support multiple use cases: Different teams can consume data at the layer that makes sense for them
• Enable iterative development: We can refine gold layer analytics without touching bronze or silver
• Reduce computation costs: By separating concerns, we only reprocess what's necessary

Real-World Implementation

When we build medallion architectures for clients, we typically use Snowflake or StarRocks as the data warehouse. The bronze layer might pull from Tessitura's API every hour, landing raw JSON or CSV data. Silver layer transformations clean customer records and standardize transaction formats. Finally, gold layer tables aggregate this into actionable insights—like "total customer lifetime value including tickets, concessions, and donations."

The Bottom Line

Medallion architecture isn't just an engineering pattern—it's a framework that brings clarity to complex data environments. For organizations managing multiple customer touchpoints and data systems, it provides the structure needed to move from data chaos to data confidence.