Medallion architecture vs. reality - when your Databricks bronze, silver and gold are just folders

Three schemas. Bronze, silver, gold. The diagram got nods in the architecture review. Then two dashboards land in the same leadership meeting with two different active customer counts, and the head of finance asks which one is right.

The trail ends at bronze, where rows that failed parsing were quietly dropped. The vendor keeps thirty days. Every label was there. What the medallion was invented to fix was not, and the pipeline had rebuilt the old mess across three schemas.

In this episode:
- What pipelines looked like before bronze, silver and gold, and the three pains the diagram was…