What The Forge does

What you'll accomplish: Understand how Forge jobs process zip archives and connect to the Data lake.

What is The Forge?

The Forge runs jobs on zip uploads — especially image folders or text corpora — and produces outputs you can use downstream. When a job finishes with tabular results, Heimdall registers a bronze table in the Data catalog.

Typical workflow

1. Prepare a zip (folder layout guide).
2. Create a Forge job in the app and upload the zip.
3. Track progress until the job completes.
4. Open Data — find the new bronze table.
5. Optional: silver → gold → train ML or Forecast.

What you can process

• Images — classification-style folder structures (e.g. Fire/ vs NoFire/)
• Text — documents organized for NLP-style pipelines
• Structured exports — tabular outputs land in bronze like a normal upload

ML and Forecast training

Do not expect to train directly from an old Forge dataset picker in the ML wizard. Publish gold from the Data lake after your bronze table is ready. See Build an ML model.

What happens next

• Preparing zip datasets
• Your data overview
• Unstructured APIs for one-off text/image analysis without Forge jobs