# Data platform

Author: Murali Sid (https://linkedin.com/in/muralisid)
Source: https://www.agenticarchitectureskills.com/library/layers/r02-data-platform
Published: 2026-09-18
Updated: 2026-09-18
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Cite as: Murali Sid. Data platform. Agentic Architecture Skills. https://www.agenticarchitectureskills.com/library/layers/r02-data-platform

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Status: complete (published 2026-08-19). Scope finalized at Batch A kickoff with maintainer POV; see findings.md and sources.md.

## Scope inventory (v0) [#scope-inventory-v0]

* **Current estate**: lake/warehouse/lakehouse, streaming and CDC, BigData estate, data catalogs and metadata management, MDM, data quality, lineage
* **Agent grounding**: semantic and metrics layers, vector stores and hybrid search, permission-aware retrieval with ACL sync from source systems into every index; graph databases treated as a challenged default, not an assumption (first named debate)
* **Governance**: data classification, data contracts and data products (mesh operating model), consent capture, retention
* **Agent-era additions**: freshness pipelines for grounding, index lifecycle management, storage and embedding cost tiers, synthetic data

## Challenged-default candidates [#challenged-default-candidates]

Graph databases vs topic modelling with contextual embeddings as the retriever (first named debate); dedicated vector databases vs pgvector or existing search engines; data mesh operating models vs a plainly governed warehouse. Each track proposes its final list at kickoff.

## Files [#files]

`findings.md` and `sources.md` carry this track's research. The scoping brief and the vendor map were archived on 2026-08-23 (see `archive/`, decision D038).