How I would fill the bronze layer

CDC when the log can see deletes. A cheaper pattern for every other source. One envelope for silver.

Layers, with more than one way in. Four sources, one landing, then bronze, silver, gold. A share sits beside that path. It is not a landing.

In a design review, a junior engineer drew one path for bronze. Read the change log, land every change, and use that path for every source. I liked it. One story is easier to carry than five, and the log is a clear record of what the database did.

Then we walked the sources. The orders table deletes rows for real, and we are allowed to read its log. That one stays on the path he drew. The partner file has no log to read. The lookup is small enough to copy. The API will not hand us a log. The service we already own can publish the decision itself.

The rest of this is that review, written down. Where the log can see a delete, I would still read it. Everywhere else I would take the smaller path. The landing is the one thing I would keep the same, so silver does not have to ask which path a row took.

What bronze is for

His path was close, and bronze is why. In The Medallion Architecture Reconsidered, bronze is where data sits as it arrived. You can play it again. If the cleaning needs another try, you rebuild silver from bronze, instead of asking the source for history it may no longer have. Cleaning, duplicates, and business rules can wait.