Bronze, silver, and gold: lay out a new pipeline's layers

Every new source lands in one folder and nobody can tell what's safe to query yet.

Beginner to intermediateRead 4 minDoing: a couple of hours to lay out and check three tables for one new source6 steps

▶ Start

What you'll have at the end

Three clearly separated tables, raw, cleaned, and business-ready, for one new data source

Before you start

You need

A new data source you're about to bring into your warehouse or lakehouse for the first time, and write access to create three new tables or schemas for it.

Not covered

Choosing the storage format under these tables, or writing the extract job that pulls the source in.

Leans on

6 steps

Where to go next

Design your first star schema

for turning the gold layer into a proper fact-and-dimension model once one flat table stops being enough

OLTP vs OLAP: decide when a report needs its own warehouse

for deciding whether a source needs a warehouse at all, before you lay out its layers

Checked 25 Aug 2026

Part of the Data Warehousing cookbook