Medallion Architecture interview questions

Interactive Databricks interview questions on Medallion Architecture. Same topic as /learn/databricks/medallion. Bronze keeps the raw files. Silver is typed and joined. Gold is the metric table BI actually queries.

Lesson · Simulation

beginner

Medallion Architecture

What are bronze, silver, and gold for?

Answer it out loud, then reveal. Play steps through like the simulators.

Open lesson See it in the simulator

Production scenario

Medallion Architecture

Three 'revenue' numbers in three dashboards

Symptoms

Each team aggregated bronze differently
No gold owner

Open lesson See it in the simulator

All questions on this page

Indexed as FAQ. Open any item if you prefer a list to Play.

beginner

What are bronze, silver, and gold for?

Medallion Architecture · tap to open the answer

Short: Bronze = raw replay. Silver = conformed truth. Gold = product metrics.

Detailed: Bronze keeps original bytes. Silver types, dedupes, joins. Gold is the grain BI/ML consume. Arrows only flow downstream.

Common mistake: Medallion as three folders with the same messy table copied three times.

Follow-up: Who is allowed to write back into bronze?

Lesson · Simulation

intermediate

Why not serve bronze to a dashboard?

Medallion Architecture · tap to open the answer

Short: Every filter becomes a full scan of landing JSON, and metrics disagree.

Detailed: Bronze has no stable schema contract. Gold is small, named, and owned. Silver is what jobs share so gold doesn't re-parse.

Common mistake: Skipping silver 'to move faster'.

Follow-up: Where do quality expectations live?

Lesson · Simulation

senior

How do you handle a late-arriving correction in medallion?

Medallion Architecture · tap to open the answer

Short: Land it in bronze, merge into silver on the business key, rebuild gold from silver — never patch gold by hand.

Detailed: If you edit gold, you can't reconstruct yesterday. MERGE in silver with event time. Gold is a projection.

Senior: Drop silver+gold, rebuild from bronze, numbers match. If they don't, gold had hidden logic.

Common mistake: UPDATE gold.daily_revenue in a notebook because finance asked.

Follow-up: What's the replay test?

Lesson · Simulation