Before we answer what is data architecture let’s ask ourselves what is data? Data can be anything, it can be simple or complicated and small or huge. Simple like how many times we check our twitter profile on daily basis or complicated like recording from electricity & gas meter. Data architecture is how data collected, stored, cleaned, structured and use in data systems and in organizations.

Consider the use case of retail chain, they sell products over the physical store or online. At the same time, we have returns which are happening over different places. They can be considered as a different source system. Now business users want to see total sales across the different channels and total returns.

These are the 3 source of data which I ingested in the staging area and based on the business logic loaded onto data warehouse.  Below is the sample data architecture diagram which I created on Excalidraw.

Sources can be SQL server, oracle, cloud or flat files etc. Data is ingested to staging layer i.e., pulling data from different sources and dumping at one place. The data is transformed based on the business rules and loaded into the warehouse using Tableau Prep/Informatica or any other ETL tool.  Now we have well-structured data we can use Tableau Desktop to make different visualizations and publish it onto the tableau server for the business users.