As companies increasingly become data-driven organizations, their Data Warehouse (DWH) infrastructure becomes crucial to their operations. For a client in the luxury goods sector, their legacy DWH had been built over 20 years ago, accumulating various hotfixes and exceptions. This outdated system resulted in stability and performance issues that hindered the company’s ability to meet new business requirements and technological innovations.

Addressing Critical Pipeline Issues

One of the most pressing challenges was the inefficiency of critical pipelines that generated key reports. Any failure in these pipelines could cause delays, with execution times stretching to hours, which was unacceptable given the urgency of the reports. This highlighted the need for a comprehensive DWH migration and refactoring process.

To resolve these challenges, BIP xTech conducted a detailed assessment to determine the scope of modernization and select the right technologies. The decision was made to migrate the DWH to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), utilizing BigQuery and Dataform for seamless data transformation.

Leveraging BigQuery and Dataform

BigQuery was chosen for its superior performance compared to the old on-premises hardware, as well as its seamless integration with Business Intelligence tools and adherence to industry security standards. Additionally, its pay-as-you-go model allowed the client to manage costs effectively during the migration phase.

Dataform acted as the orchestrator, executing queries from BigQuery to BigQuery. This choice was ideal because most transformations in the legacy system were already implemented in SQL, minimizing the need for extensive rewriting of pipelines. Dataform also brought modern software engineering practices into the mix, such as version control, data quality checks, and unit tests, ensuring a single source of truth for the company’s data.

Cloud-Native Advantages

Migrating to the cloud provided the client with numerous native GCP features that significantly enhanced their infrastructure. For instance, the use of table snapshots allowed for instant data rollbacks, while Cloud Workflow facilitated seamless integration between Dataform and other GCP services. Real-time monitoring via Cloud Alerting ensured that any errors were immediately addressed.

The migration to BigQuery resulted in a dramatic reduction in pipeline execution times. The first pipeline optimized saw execution time drop from two hours to just a few minutes, showcasing the significant performance improvements.

Cost Reduction and Scalability

The migration also led to cost savings by utilizing BigQuery's pay-as-you-go model, which optimized queries to load only necessary data. Furthermore, the fully managed architecture of GCP eliminated infrastructure management costs and provided automatic scalability to meet the client’s growing needs.

Improved Data Quality and Documentation

By leveraging Dataform, the project produced integrated documentation that accelerated the onboarding of new team members. Additionally, data cleaning processes and transformation checks reduced the number of errors and provided detailed logs for easy troubleshooting.

The successful DWH migration from Oracle to BigQuery has transformed the client’s data infrastructure, providing them with improved performance, reduced costs, and enhanced data management capabilities. By partnering with BIP xTech, the luxury goods company has positioned itself for ongoing success in a data-driven world, ensuring that their IT infrastructure is scalable, reliable, and future-proof.