a staging bucket is a temporary storage location used in cloud-based data workflows and ETL processes. It holds data before it is processed, transformed, or loaded into a more permanent storage or processing system. Staging buckets provide flexibility, scalability, and data integrity in data pipelines by decoupling data ingestion and processing from the main storage or processing systems. They are commonly used in cloud computing platforms like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage.