nw-data-architecture-patterns git:20260320.d98f3cbA

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name: nw-data-architecture-patterns
description: Data architecture patterns (warehouse, lake, lakehouse, mesh), ETL/ELT pipelines, streaming architectures, scaling strategies, and schema design patterns
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---

# Data Architecture Patterns

## Architecture Selection Decision Tree

Structured only -> **Data Warehouse** | Mixed + SQL analytics -> **Data Lakehouse** | Mixed + ML-primary -> **Data Lake** | Large org + autonomous domains -> **Data Mesh**

## Data Warehouse

Schema: structured, schema-on-write | Data: tables, rows, columns | Governance: centralized | Query: SQL analytics, BI | Architecture: centralized single source of truth

### Schema Patterns

**Star Schema**: Central fact table (measures) surrounded by denormalized dimension tables. Best for BI dashboards, standard reporting.

**Snowflake Schema**: Normalized dimensions (dimensions reference other dimensions). Reduces storage, increases JOIN complexity. Best when storage cost matters more than query speed.

### Kimball vs Inmon

**Kimball (Bottom-Up)**: Build data marts first, integrate later | Star schema, business-process driven | Faster initial delivery | Best for quick wins, department-level analytics

**Inmon (Top-Down)**: Build enterprise DW first, derive data marts | Normalized 3NF enterprise model | Higher upfront effort | Best for large enterprises needing single source of truth

Technology: Snowflake | Amazon Redshift | Google BigQuery | Azure Synapse Analytics

## Data Lake

Schema-on-read, flexible | All formats (structured, semi-structured, unstructured) | Raw data in native format | Query via Athena, Spark SQL, PySpark, Pandas | Risk: "data swamp" without governance

### Organization
Zones: **raw** (landing, original format) -> **curated** (cleaned, validated) -> **processed** (transformed for use cases) -> **archive** (cold storage)

### Anti-Patterns
- No metadata catalog -> undiscoverable data
- No access controls -> security/compliance risk
- No data quality checks -> garbage in/out
- No retention policy -> unbounded cost growth

Technology: S3 + Athena/Glue | Azure Data Lake Storage + Synapse | HDFS + Hive

## Data Lakehouse

Combines warehouse reliability with lake flexibility | Schema enforcement on write with evolution support | ACID transactions on lake storage | Supports both BI/SQL and ML/data science workloads

### Medallion Architecture (Bronze / Silver / Gold)

**Bronze**: Raw data as-is, append-only for auditability, partitioned by ingestion date, schema-on-read
**Silver**: Quality rules (null checks, range validation, referential integrity) | Deduplication on business keys | Schema enforced | SCD applied
**Gold**: Business-level aggregations | Dimensional models (star/snowflake) | Pre-computed metrics/KPIs | Optimized for BI/reporting

Technology: Databricks (Delta Lake) | Apache Iceberg | Apache Hudi

## Data Mesh

### Core Principles (Martin Fowler)
1. **Domain-oriented ownership**: Data owned by domain teams, not central
2. **Data as a product**: Each domain publishes discoverable, trustworthy, self-describing data products
3. **Self-serve data platform**: Infrastructure team provides platform for domain teams
4. **Federated computational governance**: Global standards with domain autonomy

**Use when**: Large org with autonomous domain teams | Central data team is bottleneck | Domain expertise needed | Platform engineering maturity exists
**Avoid when**: Small team (<50 engineers) | Simple data needs | No platform capability | Unclear domain boundaries

## ETL vs ELT Pipeline Design

### ETL (Extract-Transform-Load)
Transform before loading via dedicated engine (Informatica, Talend, SSIS). Best for complex transforms, constrained targets, regulatory requirements. Scaling limited by transform engine.

### ELT (Extract-Load-Transform)
Load raw first, transform using target compute (dbt, Snowflake SQL, BigQuery SQL). Best for cloud DWs with elastic compute, preserving raw data. Scales with target system.

### Pipeline Design Principles
- **Idempotency**: Re-running produces same result (use MERGE/upsert, not INSERT)
- **Incremental processing**: Process only new/changed data (watermarks, CDC)
- **Schema evolution**: Handle added/removed columns gracefully (schema registry)
- **Data quality gates**: Validate between stages (null rates, row counts, value ranges)
- **Observability**: Log metrics (rows processed, duration, errors, freshness)

### Orchestration
Apache Airflow: DAG-based, Python-native, wide adoption | Prefect: modern, dynamic workflows | Dagster: software-defined assets

## Streaming Architecture

### Apache Kafka
Distributed event streaming platform. Concepts: topics, partitions, consumer groups, offsets. At-least-once delivery (exactly-once with transactions). Use as event bus, message broker, stream storage.

### Apache Flink
Stateful stream processing engine. Concepts: DataStreams, windows (tumbling, sliding, session), state management. Exactly-once with checkpointing. Common pattern: Sources -> Kafka (durable event buffer) -> Flink (stateful compute) -> Sinks.

### Architecture Selection
**Streaming**: real-time dashboards, fraud detection, IoT, event-driven | **Batch**: overnight reporting, historical analysis, ML training | **Lambda**: parallel batch + stream (complex, prefer Kappa) | **Kappa**: stream-only, reprocess from Kafka log (simpler)

## Scaling Strategies

### Vertical (Scale Up)
Add CPU/RAM/storage to existing server | Simpler ops, no app changes | Hard limit: largest hardware | Use first for moderate growth

### Horizontal (Scale Out)

**Read Replicas**: Replicate to read-only copies | Route reads to replicas, writes to primary | Trade-off: replication lag (eventual consistency) | Use for read-heavy workloads

**Partitioning (Single Server)**: Range (date, alphabetical) | List (region, category) | Hash (even distribution) | Benefits: query pruning, maintenance (drop old partitions)

**Sharding (Multiple Servers)**: Distribute data across DB instances by shard key | Strategies: range-based, hash-based, directory-based, geographic

**Shard Key Selection** (most impactful decision):
- High cardinality for even distribution
- Even access frequency to avoid hot shards
- Query alignment: most queries target single shard
- Avoid monotonically increasing keys (hot spots)

**Challenges**: Cross-shard queries need scatter-gather | Distributed transactions (2PC) complex/slow | Resharding expensive | App complexity increases

### Scaling Decision Guide
Not exceeding single server -> optimize queries/indexes first | Read-heavy -> add read replicas | Write-heavy + partitionable -> partition then shard | Write-heavy + not partitionable -> write-optimized DBs (Cassandra, DynamoDB)

## Normalization vs Denormalization

**Normalize (3NF)**: OLTP with frequent writes | Data integrity paramount | Storage optimization | Write > read performance
**Denormalize**: OLAP/analytics (star schema) | Read-heavy, predictable queries | Query > write performance | Acceptable redundancy

**Practical approach**: Start normalized for transactional tables | Add denormalized/materialized views for reporting | Denormalize selectively based on measured performance | Document decisions and rationale