Guided Lesson: VForce Lakehouse Fundamentals

1. Welcome

What is VForce Lakehouse?

VForce Lakehouse is Edgent's governed, open data platform. It stores everything in open table formats (Apache Iceberg) so any engine can read it, organizes data in a medallion architecture, and exposes a live catalog with real-time, self-service analytics.

In this lesson you will cover the medallion tiers, the Iceberg guarantees, and governance - then verify it against the running platform.

2. The Medallion: Bronze, Silver, Gold

Three refinement tiers

• Bronze - raw, append-only, immutable. Every record is registered exactly as received: nothing lost, everything auditable.
• Silver - cleaned and conformed: validated, de-duplicated, consistent schemas.
• Gold - aggregated, business-ready: the tables that power dashboards and reporting.

3. Why Apache Iceberg

Warehouse guarantees on open files

Apache Iceberg is an open table format: it lets plain data files in cloud storage behave like a real database table, so any engine can query them with strong guarantees and no vendor lock-in.

Key terms

Open table format

A published, non-proprietary way of organizing data files plus the metadata that describes them, so many different tools can read and write the same tables. The opposite of data trapped inside one vendor's warehouse.

ACID transactions

A guarantee that a set of changes either all succeed together or none do, and that readers never see a half-finished write. It is what makes a data store safe to use with many readers and writers at once.

Schema evolution

The ability to add, rename, or change columns over time without rewriting or reloading the data that is already stored.

Snapshot

A saved, read-only view of a table at a single moment. Iceberg records a new snapshot on every write.

Time-travel

Querying an earlier snapshot to see the data exactly as it looked at a past point in time, which is useful for audits and for reproducing an old report.

Catalog

The service (here, an iceberg-rest catalog) that lists the available tables and their current state so any compatible query engine can discover and read them live.

4. Governance & Multi-Tenancy

Isolated, traceable, reproducible

Governance is how a data platform stays trustworthy: keeping each customer's data separate, tracking where every value came from, and controlling who can see or change it.

Key terms

Namespace

A named container for tables, much like a folder. VForce Lakehouse gives each tenant its own top-level namespace (for example tenant_demo), so their data is separated by design.

Multi-tenancy

One shared platform serving many separate customers, called tenants, while keeping each tenant's data fully isolated from every other tenant.

Tenant isolation

The rule that one tenant can never read or affect another tenant's data. Here it is enforced at the namespace root, so isolation is structural rather than just a setting.

Lineage

A traceable record of where each piece of data came from and how it was transformed, so any number in a gold table can be followed all the way back to the raw records that produced it.

Governance

The controls around who may read or change data and how those actions are tracked, so the platform stays auditable and compliant.

Cloud-agnostic

Because the foundation is open files and open table formats, the same lakehouse runs on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud storage with no proprietary lock-in.

5. See It Running

The live platform

Open the catalog and browse the medallion namespaces. The engagement data from this LMS lands there: xAPI statements flow into demo.bronze.xapi_statements and aggregate into demo.gold.xapi_engagement.

Open the live catalog, then click Finish and take the Knowledge Check.