Comparison
Landing zonevsStaging layer
Landing zone
the file arrives in a bucket exactly as the vendor sent it, wrong headers and all, and nothing touches it there.
The place raw arrivals are written before anything is done to them, kept byte-for-byte as received. It exists so that every downstream mistake is recoverable without asking the source again — you can reprocess history because you still have history. The discipline is that nothing edits it in place, which is what makes it worth the storage bill.
Full entry →Staging layer
the supplier renamed a column overnight and you fixed it in one place instead of in forty downstream queries.
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.
Full entry →