Data engineering·Moving data out of the source
the supplier renamed a column overnight and you fixed it in one place instead of in forty downstream queries.
Staging layer
Also calledstaging table, staging model
A thin layer between the raw arrival and any real logic, where names, types and light cleaning are standardised and nothing else happens. Its job is to be the single place a source's oddities are absorbed, so a supplier renaming a column is one edit rather than forty. Skipping it feels faster for the first month and is the reason mature warehouses have the source's naming conventions leaking into business models.