Lakehouse Architecture for Unified Analytics – A Data Analyst’s Guide to Accelerated Insights

A data flow design for modern data analytics.

The medallion architecture empowers data analysts to access trusted data, collaborate with colleagues, and uncover invaluable insights quickly and efficiently. Analysts can unlock the full potential of their organization's data and drive informed decision-making by understanding the distinct layers of the data lakehouse and its role in unifying data analytics.

The Medallion Architecture

• Bronze layer (raw data): This is where the data journey begins. Data engineers ingest raw data from various sources, preserving its original state. While analysts may not interact directly with this layer, it forms the foundation of the entire data ecosystem.
• Silver layer (validated data): This is where data analysts typically start their work. Data engineers have already cleansed, validated, and enriched the raw data, ensuring it is accurate and reliable for analysis. Analysts can confidently explore, query, and visualize this data to uncover initial insights.
• Gold layer (refined insights): This is where data analysis occurs. Data scientists and data engineers transform the validated data into aggregated, summarized, and optimized formats, creating the "golden nuggets" of information that drive business decisions. Analysts can easily access these preprocessed datasets for in-depth analysis, reporting, and dashboarding.

Unifying Data Analytics

A modern lakehouse, like Dremio, plays a vital role in every layer of the medallion architecture, providing a unified platform for data engineering, data science, and data analytics:

• Data ingestion: Dremio's high-performance connectors ingest data from cloud and on-prem sources into the bronze layer.
• Data curation: In the silver layer, Dremio's data curation capabilities validate, cleanse, and enrich the data, ensuring its readiness for analysis.
• Data transformation: Dremio's powerful query engine transforms data into a business-ready view in the gold layer, enabling analysts to focus on personalized business use cases rather than endless data wrangling.
• Self-service analytics: A wide range of BI tool connectors easily connect your analysis with your BI or data visualization tool of choice, including Power BI, Tableau, Looker, Qlik, and many others.

Why Data Analysts Should Care

The medallion architecture, powered by Dremio, revolutionizes the way data analysts work:

• Trusted data: Access to curated, validated data in the silver and gold layers saves time and increases confidence in analysis outcomes.
• Faster insights: High-performance query engines and pre-aggregated data enable rapid analysis and reporting.
• Collaboration: The centralized lakehouse fosters collaboration with data engineers and data scientists, leading to more comprehensive and impactful insights.
• Empowerment: Self-service analytics capabilities allow analysts to explore data independently, uncover hidden patterns, and drive business decisions.

Get Started Today

Experience Dremio for yourself. Get started with Dremio today and discover how easy it can be to access, analyze, and share insights that drive business impact.

Additional Resources

The Unified Apache Iceberg Lakehouse: Self Service & Ease of Use

The Unified Lakehouse: Performant Data Access

Unified Semantic Layer: A Modern Solution for Self-Service Analytics