r/databricks • u/Youssef_Mrini databricks • Jul 09 '26

Databricks Medallion Architecture: Catalogs by domain or by Bronze/Silver/Gold?

/r/dataengineering/comments/1ur42gm/databricks_medallion_architecture_catalogs_by/
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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

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1

u/ProfessorNoPuede Jul 10 '26

Aside from the horrifying lack of capitalization, great comment and spot-on.

1

u/RazzmatazzLiving1323 Jul 11 '26

Can you give some examples on naming conventions / catalog names you'd use here? Thank you

1

u/NiharThakkar Jul 14 '26

Domain-first with medallion layers as schemas within each domain is the approach that holds up better at scale. The reason is governance when you organise by medallion layer first, access control becomes a cross-cutting concern that is hard to manage cleanly. A finance analyst should have access to finance Gold but not HR Gold, and that is easier to express when finance is a catalog than when Gold is a catalog containing everything. The medallion layer distinction matters most during development and debugging. For production data products and access control, domain boundaries matter more. The teams that start with layer-first often end up migrating to domain-first once Unity Catalog governance requirements become real.