A well-designed data product should not be the accidental result of whatever happened in Silver.
Most warehouse projects begin with source-shaped Bronze data, create a generalized Silver layer, and defer the Gold model until the end. By then, transitional structures and early implementation decisions have begun dictating the business contract. This session argues for a different design sequence: understand Bronze, define Gold, and only then determine which Silver states are necessary to connect them.
Gold represents the data product at the minimum grain promised by its business contract. It preserves the entities, events, relationships, history, and quality expectations consumers can depend upon without pre-aggregating away future questions. Measures and aggregations remain in the semantic model—the layer sometimes described as Platinum in Microsoft Fabric.
This session examines Silver as an intentional transition rather than a mandatory, all-purpose layer. T-SQL examples will illustrate the different roles of views, CTEs, window functions, and persisted intermediate structures. Particular attention will be given to repeated CTE logic: when a CTE is simply useful query syntax, and when an expensive calculation shared across multiple transformations indicates that a reusable, precomputed Silver state should exist.
Attendees will leave with a contract-first modeling method, practical criteria for introducing multiple Silver layers, and a clearer boundary between reusable business data and downstream aggregation.
