1. Architecture overview
Purpose, scope, and design intent for this phase.
This page documents a proposed approach for the fictional GreenBox portfolio. Decisions and outcomes are illustrative until validated against business requirements, source data, security constraints, and measured implementation results.
Design area 01
Environment strategy
Separate development, test and production responsibilities; promote changes through controlled deployment rather than editing production objects directly.
Design area 02
Database and schema layers
RAW for source-aligned landing data; STAGING for source-specific cleaning; INTERMEDIATE for reusable business transformations; ANALYTICS for dimensions, facts and governed consumption. These are logical conventions to validate against the team's deployment approach.
Design area 03
Compute and workload isolation
Use virtual warehouses sized for ingestion, transformation, BI and ad hoc work as appropriate. Configure auto-suspend/auto-resume, resource monitors and workload-specific sizing; measure before scaling.
Design area 04
Security and access
Use role-based access control and least privilege. Separate service roles from human roles, restrict production write access, protect sensitive columns, and use managed secrets rather than credentials in code.
2. Implementation considerations
Controls and decisions to make the design supportable, explainable, and testable.
Data movement and orchestration
Source connectors land data; dbt builds dependency-ordered transformations; an orchestrator schedules and monitors jobs. Retries, idempotency, freshness checks and failure alerts are explicit design concerns.
Operational controls
Track cost, query performance, freshness, failures, access changes and deployment outcomes. Define ownership and escalation paths.
Key design decisions
Region and account topology; database/schema naming; warehouse sizing; network and identity controls; retention and recovery requirements; deployment tool; environment promotion strategy.
Acceptance criteria
A documented environment and role model; least-privilege access matrix; named workload warehouses; cost-control settings; lineage from raw to analytics; repeatable deployment and recovery approach.
3. Acceptance criteria and handoff
Evidence required before this phase should be considered complete.
Step 05
Next step
Build synthetic source datasets and implement the source-to-analytics path using dbt.
- Requirements and assumptions are documented and traceable.
- Business owners and technical owners are identified where applicable.
- Security, quality, and operational implications are considered.
- Validation evidence is captured; proposed designs are not presented as implemented outcomes.
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