How Nimble’s Online Pipelines Automate Data Management Across All Layers of the Medallion Framework

Businesses today rely on real-time alternative data for decision-making, but collecting, managing, and ensuring this data produces valuable insights can be complex.

Traditional data management techniques like batch processing and manual ETL workflows create bottlenecks, slowing down time-to-insights and leaving companies with outdated information that no longer applies to current market conditions.

By organizing data by tiers, the medallion framework provides a structured approach to data processing that significantly reduces confusion, siloes, and dirty data. However, it still doesn’t solve some of the biggest challenges businesses face when trying to use data: the slow speeds, high overhead, and delays that come from manual data processing.

This blog will demonstrate how Nimble’s Online Pipelines automate data processing across all three tiers of the medallion framework, resulting in improved data accuracy, instant insights, and significantly less time and effort spent on data processing. 

Key Takeaways

• Businesses need alternative real-time data pipelines to use data effectively. 
• Nimble’s Online Pipelines automate data collection, management, and usage across all layers of the medallion framework. 
• Nimble’s application of the medallion framework can be used in retail, real estate, finance, and other industries.

Deeper Insights on Medallion Architecture

This is blog #3 in our medallion architecture series. For a deeper dive into this topic, read the rest of the series below:

• Blog #1: What is Medallion Architecture? A Complete Guide to the Data Lakehouse Framework.
• Blog #2: Data Monitoring with the Medallion Architecture Framework: How to Ensure Data Quality, Compliance & Accuracy.

Understanding the Medallion Architecture Framework

What is Medallion Architecture?

Medallion Architecture is a framework used to organize data collection and processing to ensure data is fully collected, cleaned, and refined before being used in analytics, AI models, and business intelligence. It structures data transformation into three progressive layers: 

• Bronze Layer: Collects raw, unstructured data.
• Silver Layer: Cleans, enriches, and standardizes the data.
• Gold Layer: Delivers analytics-ready, structured insights.

This model is especially useful for handling unstructured alternative data—where information comes from multiple sources that come in many different formats and structures.  Raw data, often inconsistent or incomplete, must be standardized and enriched before it becomes business-ready. The Medallion Framework provides a scalable, repeatable method to do this efficiently.

Why Medallion Architecture Is Essential for Alternative Data Pipelines

Today’s businesses rely on many different real-time, external data sources to make informed decisions, but the data from these sources are often unstructured, messy, and massive in scope. This presents the following challenges: 

• Inconsistencies: Data formats vary across sources.
• Missing values: Partial or outdated data reduces reliability.
• Scalability issues: Manual workflows don’t scale for high-volume data.

A structured data pipeline that follows the medallion framework ensures that data is cleaned, enriched, and delivered in real-time—ensuring accuracy, compliance, and usability. 

How Nimble’s Online Pipelines Automate Medallion Architecture Workflows

The Challenge: Why Manual Data Workflows Are Inefficient

Managing alternative data—like social media sentiment, geospatial data, e-commerce prices, weather data, and virtually any other public web content—traditionally requires extensive engineering resources. The typical process involves:

1. Data Collection: Manually scraping or purchasing raw data from multiple sources.
2. Data Cleaning & Processing: Removing duplicates, standardizing formats, and enriching the data with additional attributes.
3. Data Delivery: Structuring and integrating the cleaned data into analytics platforms.

This approach has significant drawbacks:

• Time-Consuming: Manual ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) workflows slow down data delivery, making insights obsolete by the time they’re available.
• Error-Prone: Human-driven processes introduce inconsistencies, leading to incomplete or inaccurate datasets.
• Resource-Intensive: Companies need specialized engineering teams to maintain scraping scripts, clean raw data, and format it for analysis.
• Scalability Issues: As data volume grows, managing pipelines manually becomes unfeasible.

Without automation, businesses struggle with delays, unreliable data, and high operational costs—all of which limit their ability to make timely, data-driven decisions.

How Nimble’s Online Pipelines Solve This Problem in Bronze, Silver, Gold Data

Nimble’s Online Pipelines automate data processing across the entire Medallion Architecture workflow, eliminating manual bottlenecks and ensuring real-time delivery of structured, gold-level data that’s ready to be integrated into data analytics platforms or agentic workflows.

Key Capabilities of Nimble’s Online Pipelines

• End-to-End Automation: From collecting data from anywhere across the web to transforming it into business-ready insights, Nimble handles every stage without human intervention.
• AI-Driven Collection Optimization: Nimble’s browserless drivers and automated JSON parsing dynamically adapt to different website structures, avoiding detection and maximizing data completeness.
• Automated Data Cleaning & Enrichment: Nimble uses automated parsing and structuring agents to ensure high-quality, structured datasets that are ready for analysis.
• Real-Time Delivery: Our alternative data enrichment pipelines deliver updated data as soon as it becomes available, guaranteeing fresh, actionable data at all times.
• Scalable & Resilient Architecture: Nimble’s pipelines can easily scale to handle enterprise-level data ingestion without performance degradation.

Bronze Layer: Collecting Unstructured Data

The Bronze Layer is responsible for gathering raw, unstructured data from diverse sources. This is the foundation of the Medallion Architecture, ensuring businesses have access to real-world insights in their most granular form.

How Nimble Collects Data

Nimble’s Online Pipelines extract data from any public data source, including:

• Public Websites: Company information, pricing data, customer reviews.  
• Social Media Platforms: Brand sentiment, trending discussions, user-generated content, job postings.
• E-commerce Marketplaces (Including Amazon and Walmart): Competitor pricing, inventory levels, customer feedback, product details.
• Financial Filings: Earnings reports, SEC filings, regulatory disclosures.
• SERPs: Headings, descriptions, top ads, AI overviews, images. 

Unlike static datasets that quickly become outdated, Nimble’s real-time pipelines continuously refresh data, ensuring businesses always have access to the most recent information.

Key Technologies

Nimble employs proprietary scraping and data extraction technologies to collect high-quality alternative data while avoiding common barriers like complex website formatting, anti-data collection measures, and geographic restrictions.

• AI Fingerprinting: Mimics human browsing behavior to avoid detection by bot prevention systems.
• Residential Proxies: Routes requests through real-user IPs from across the globe, ensuring access to geo-restricted content.
• Browserless Drivers: Automatically adjusts requests to adapt to site structure changes and resolve access issues.
• Automated JSON Parsing: Extracts and structures data in real-time, even from dynamically rendered web pages.

These technologies enable Nimble to gather high-quality, structured raw data at scale—without interruptions or data loss.

Silver Layer: Cleaning and Enriching Data

The Silver Layer prepares raw data for analysis by resolving inconsistencies, enriching it with additional context, and ensuring it meets quality standards. Without this step, data remains noisy, fragmented, and difficult to use.

How Nimble’s Online Pipelines Transform Data

By cleaning and enriching raw data, Nimble ensures businesses receive structured, high-quality datasets ready for analytics and AI-driven insights. This eliminates the need for manual data wrangling, allowing teams to focus on extracting value rather than fixing errors.

Nimble processes data via: 

Automated Processing & Cleaning

• Deduplication: Removes redundant records to prevent inaccurate analysis.
• Data Normalization: Standardizes formats across different sources, ensuring consistency.

Data Enrichment Capabilities

• Sentiment Analysis: Applies AI to user reviews and social media data, extracting and categorizing feedback based on positive, neutral, or negative sentiment, topics shared, and specific emotions like joy, anger, or sadness. 
• Entity Matching: Identifies similar or identical data points between disparate data sources to enable intelligent comparison and analysis. (For example, the same product listed on two different e-commerce marketplaces) 

Gold Layer: Delivering Business-Ready Data

The Gold Layer transforms enriched data into structured, analytics-ready datasets. At this stage, businesses receive real-time, actionable intelligence that can be seamlessly integrated into their workflows.

How Nimble’s Online Pipelines Deliver Insights

• Data Output Formats: Can output data in CSV, JSON, and other popular data formats, or directly integrate into APIs for easy consumption.
• Real-Time Data Updates: Delivers a continuous stream of constantly updated data to ensure maximum freshness and accuracy. 
• Built-in Compliance & Security: Adheres to ethical data collection practices and regulatory standards, including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and the terms of service and robots.txt files of specific websites. 
• Seamless Integration: Integrates natively into Databricks and business apps like Microsoft Teams, and offers easy integration with cloud warehouses and agentic workflows.
• Unified Source of Data: Dozens of different data sources can be combined into one single source of data, enabling a comprehensive view of all relevant data and the ability to compare data points across multiple sources.
• Instant Insights: Nimble’s Knowledge Cloud applies AI agents to analyze and extract insights from unified data for you, providing immediate business intelligence.

Why This Matters

• Saves Engineering Time: Eliminates the need for in-house data pipeline management.
• Accelerates Decision-Making: Provides real-time, structured data for immediate insights.
• Supports AI & Analytics: Ensures high-quality datasets for machine learning models and BI tools.

Skip the headache of data collection and processing and skip straight to insights—Try Nimble’s Knowledge Cloud.

By automating the entire Medallion Architecture workflow, Nimble allows businesses to focus on strategy rather than infrastructure. Whether it’s competitive intelligence, sentiment analysis, or financial monitoring, Nimble delivers the data companies need—without the complexity.

Use Cases: How Nimble Online Pipelines Apply the Medallion Framework Across Industries

E-Commerce & Retail: Competitor Pricing Intelligence

Retailers operating in competitive markets absolutely need real-time pricing intelligence to fuel dynamic pricing algorithms and keep up with the competition. 

Without automated data pipelines to provide this intelligence, retail businesses struggle with fragmented, outdated, and error-prone pricing data that isn’t suited for automated pricing algorithms. Fortunately, Nimble’s Online Pipelines leverages the medallion framework to solve this problem by providing instant, ready-to-use competitive pricing data that can be directly fed into dynamic pricing tools.

Bronze Layer: Collecting Raw Pricing Data

To gather competitor pricing data at scale, Nimble’s alternative data pipelines collect data from thousands of e-commerce websites, including online marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, Walmart, eBay), direct-to-consumer brand websites, and third-party price comparison platforms. Residential proxies enable access to region-specific pricing, capturing variations across different markets. The collected data includes:

• Product names and SKUs across multiple retailers.
• Listed and promotional prices, including discounts.
• Stock availability and supply chain indicators.
• Shipping costs and estimated delivery times.
• Historical price trends, if available from cached sources.

Silver Layer: Cleaning and Enriching Pricing Data

Once raw pricing data is collected, Nimble processes and refines it for accuracy and consistency. 

Nimble’s data processing pipeline automatically deduplicate product listings. Our entity-matching technology ensures that identical products across multiple retailers are linked correctly. Normalization techniques standardize price formats, currency conversions, and variations in how promotions are displayed. Additional data enrichment processes include:

• Price trend analysis: Identifies patterns in historical pricing to detect discount cycles.
• Competitive benchmarking: Compares pricing strategies across different retailers for similar SKUs.
• Demand estimation: Correlates pricing changes with stock availability and consumer demand signals.

Gold Layer: Delivering Actionable Pricing Insights

At the Gold Layer, Nimble transforms cleansed pricing data into structured insights, making it available in various formats (CSV, JSON, API) for seamless integration into business intelligence tools and dynamic pricing engines.

Retailers can use these insights to adjust their pricing strategies in real-time. For example, an online electronics retailer tracking competitors’ laptop prices might detect a flash sale on a popular model. With Nimble’s Online Pipelines, the retailer can automate a response—either matching the price or offering a bundled promotion to retain customers.

Learn how to leverage competitive intelligence with Nimble—Discover Nimble for Retail.

Real Estate: Market Trend Analysis

Investors, developers, and property managers need comprehensive real estate data to identify market trends, evaluate pricing strategies, and assess investment risks. Manual research is slow, prone to errors, and lacks real-time updates. Nimble’s Online Pipelines streamline real estate data collection and analysis using the Medallion Framework.

Bronze Layer: Scraping Property Listings and Market Data

Nimble’s Online Pipelines continuously scrape online real estate marketplaces (e.g., Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com), government property databases, local zoning boards, and other key data sources to collect structured and unstructured data on:

• Property listings: Prices, square footage, number of bedrooms/bathrooms.
• Rental rates: Short-term and long-term rental price fluctuations.
• Zoning and permit data: Regulations affecting property development.
• Neighborhood statistics: Crime rates, school ratings, and walkability scores.

AI-driven data collection ensures data completeness, even when real estate platforms introduce new anti-scraping protections or modify their site structure. Browserless drivers automatically adapt to these changes, reducing data loss.

Silver Layer: Standardizing and Enriching Real Estate Data

Real estate data is notoriously inconsistent due to differing listing formats, missing property attributes, and regional variations. Nimble addresses these issues by: 

• Standardizing property attributes: Ensuring uniform categorization of square footage, lot sizes, and price per square foot across datasets
• Deduplicating listings: Identifying duplicate properties listed by multiple agents or platforms
• Enriching listings with demographic data: Integrating census data, mortgage rates, and historical sale prices to provide a fuller market picture

This structured and enriched data enables real estate firms to perform accurate price modeling and location-based investment analysis.

Gold Layer: Providing Market Insights for Investment Decisions

At the Gold Layer, Nimble’s Online Pipelines deliver structured market intelligence, available in easily digestible reports or through API integrations with real estate analytics platforms. These insights allow investors to:

• Predict emerging property hotspots based on rental price increases and zoning changes
• Analyze investment risks by comparing neighborhood-level demographic trends with historical pricing volatility
• Optimize property acquisition timing based on seasonal and economic market fluctuations

For instance, a real estate investment firm evaluating apartment complexes in Los Angeles can use Nimble’s data to pinpoint areas with rising rental demand, assess risk factors (e.g., foreclosure rates, crime statistics), and time their acquisitions for maximum return.

Learn About Nimble’s Real Estate Data Pipelines—Read the Sample Notebook Here.

Finance: Regulatory Monitoring for Investment Insights

Financial markets react quickly to regulatory changes, making timely access to regulatory filings and disclosures critical for investors, hedge funds, and compliance teams. 

However, manually tracking SEC filings, central bank announcements, and legislative updates is inefficient. Nimble’s Online Pipelines automate regulatory data collection, processing, and analysis.

Bronze Layer: Collecting Regulatory Filings and Disclosures

Nimble’s pipelines continuously monitor and scrape regulatory sources, including:

• SEC filings (EDGAR database): 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K reports, insider trading disclosures.
• Global financial authorities: Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Financial Conduct Authority updates.
• Corporate press releases: Public statements regarding mergers, compliance changes, and legal disputes.
• Legislative and policy documents: New financial regulations that may impact market conditions.

These sources are collected in real-time, ensuring that investors receive the most up-to-date regulatory information.

Silver Layer: Extracting Key Insights from Regulatory Data

Regulatory documents are lengthy and complex, making it difficult to extract actionable information. Nimble’s Silver Layer processes and enhances the data by:

• Classifying document types: Automatically tagging disclosures by category (e.g., earnings reports, compliance updates, executive changes).
• Extracting key signals: Identifying risk factors such as lawsuit mentions, debt restructuring, or regulatory violations.
• Cross-referencing with market data: Comparing disclosures with stock movements, earnings forecasts, and macroeconomic indicators.

For example, if a company’s 8-K filing reveals a sudden CEO resignation, Nimble can be integrated into business apps configured to flag it as a potential risk event and correlate it with past stock price reactions.

Gold Layer: Delivering Structured Regulatory Intelligence

At the Gold Layer, Nimble transforms processed data into actionable intelligence, delivered via API or in structured datasets compatible with quantitative models. Investors can:

• Assess regulatory risks by tracking enforcement actions and financial compliance trends.
• Detect market-moving disclosures before they impact stock prices.
• Automate trading signals based on real-time filings and historical market reactions.

For example, a hedge fund tracking SEC fraud investigations can integrate Nimble’s structured data to adjust portfolio risk exposure dynamically.

Get automated, real-time data pipelines customized for your unique business needs—Book a Demo Today.

Conclusion: Streamline Your Alternative Data Needs with Nimble’s Online Pipelines

Nimble's Online Pipelines offer a streamlined approach to managing alternative data, allowing businesses to transform raw data into actionable insights with efficiency and precision. 

By streamlining data collection, processing, and transformation across the bronze, silver, and gold layers of the medallion framework, Nimble ensures businesses can have access to Gold-ready data without the need to build their own infrastructure or deal with complex engineering.

 Whether you’re in retail, e-commerce, or any other data-driven field, Nimble’s solution tackles common challenges such as data fragmentation, latency, and quality issues. With Nimble, you can trust your data to be timely, accurate, and ready to drive business results. 

Ready to transform your data strategy? Contact Nimble today.