Terminology

991 terms, tools, patterns and metrics an architect is expected to use precisely. Each one gets a short explanation of what it is, and — where it matters — what it is commonly confused with. Search filters as you type; the column headers sort.

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Kind Any concept379 practice294 pattern166 metric55 tool36 protocol35 case-study26

20 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Analytical Estate Topology	concept	Data Platform Architecture	The full picture of where analytical data lands, is transformed and is served, including the paths that bypass the intended one.
Attribute History Strategy	concept	Slowly Changing Dimensions	The per-attribute decision about whether history is overwritten, versioned or kept alongside the current value, which is a business question rather than a technical one.
Bronze Layer Contract	concept	Medallion Architecture	What the raw landing zone promises and refuses to promise — a faithful replayable copy of the source, with no correction applied.
Compute Isolation Boundary	concept	Data Platform Tenancy	The line across which one domain's analytical workload cannot affect another's performance, cost attribution or access.
DAG Dependency	concept	Batch Orchestration	The declared edge stating that one task must not start until another has succeeded, and the difference between that and merely running later.
Grain Declaration	practice	Dimensional Modelling	Stating exactly what one row of a fact table represents, before any column is chosen, because every later decision depends on it.
Hub and Satellite	pattern	Data Vault Modelling	Separating stable business keys from their changing attributes and from their relationships, so each can be loaded independently and kept forever.
Lakehouse Table Format	tool	Open Table Formats	A metadata layer over object storage that adds atomic commits, snapshots and schema evolution to files that otherwise have none.
Log-Based Ingestion	pattern	CDC Pipeline Design	Building the pipeline around a database's own change log — an initial snapshot followed by a continuous delta stream, with the two stitched together.
Merge Upsert	pattern	Ingestion Patterns	Applying a batch of changes to a target by matching on a key and inserting, updating or deleting per row, which is expensive and frequently avoidable.
Operational Data Push	pattern	Reverse ETL	Sending modelled analytical data back into operational tools, which turns a warehouse table into a production dependency with none of the guarantees.
Partition Pruning	concept	Storage Layout & Partitioning	The query planner skipping files whose partition values cannot satisfy the predicate, which is the single largest determinant of analytical query cost.
Query Federation	pattern	Data Virtualisation	Executing a single query across several underlying systems without moving the data, and the performance ceiling that pushdown determines.
Report Migration Inventory	practice	Warehouse Migration	The enumerated list of every report, extract and downstream consumer of the legacy warehouse, with usage evidence, which is what makes the migration finite.
Scanned Bytes	metric	Analytics Cost Control	The volume a query reads, which is what most analytical engines bill for and what almost every optimisation ultimately reduces.
Scheduler Control Plane	concept	Workflow Schedulers	The orchestrator's own state and availability, which becomes a critical dependency for every pipeline it runs.
Small File Problem	concept	File Formats & Compaction	The degradation that follows from many tiny files — metadata operations dominating, compression failing, and columnar formats losing their advantage.
SQL Transformation Model	concept	Transformation Frameworks	A named, versioned, tested SELECT statement that declares its own dependencies, turning transformation logic into reviewable software.
Warehouse Concurrency Scaling	concept	Workload Isolation	Adding compute clusters to absorb concurrent queries rather than queueing them, and the cost behaviour that turns a queue into a bill.
Workload Fit Assessment	practice	Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse	Choosing between warehouse, lake and lakehouse by the workloads that must run, rather than by which one is currently fashionable.