Nikola Ilic noodles a concept:
If you’ve been working with data platforms in recent years, chances are that you’ve implemented the medallion design pattern (or architecture:)) at least once. Bronze, silver, gold – raw, cleansed, curated – this design pattern has become so widely adopted that you’ll find it in every reference architecture, every certification exam, and every conference talk (including some of mine, I have to admit). And, in the vast majority of implementations I’ve seen (and built myself), all three layers are physically materialized as tables.
In this article, I’d like to challenge that habit. Not the medallion pattern itself – the logical separation of layers is, in my opinion, still of paramount importance. What I want to question is something much more specific: why is the silver layer a set of physical tables? And, with the recent announcement of GPU acceleration for the Fabric Data Warehouse, I believe this question deserves a serious answer, rather than “because that’s how the diagram looks”
Click through for Nikola’s thoughts, including when it might work for the silver layer to be virtual and when it doesn’t make sense.