Building Medallion Architectures

Chapter 8. Case Study: Data, Analytics and Business Strategy at AP Pension

In this chapter, we delve into the Medallion design employed by AP Pension, a venerable Danish pension fund. Head of Data Platform Jacob Rønnow Jensen shares his vision of the integration of AP Pension’s business and data strategy. He highlights the company’s journey toward adopting a modern data platform using Microsoft Fabric. We will explore how AP Pension addresses technical challenges, aligns data protection with data democratization principles, and optimizes the operation and overall efficiency of their analytical platform.

Jacob offers a transparent look at the evolution of data platforms, the role of lakehouses, and AP Pension’s management of a complex data landscape to maintain a competitive edge in the financial sector. We begin with an introduction to the company and its data strategy before delving into a detailed examination of the Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers of their Medallion architecture.

During this exploration, we will uncover how AP Pension manages data ingestion, metadata, and real-time data, along with their approach for deserializing JSON, and handling sensitive personal information. Jacob will share insights on CI/CD processes, workspace design, and the integration with Microsoft Purview.

We conclude with Jacob’s recommendations and insights on workload isolation, security, and logical data separation, as well as workspace and capacity management. This chapter offers a comprehensive ...