Legacy Data Warehouse Migrations to Snowflake: Success Stories from Core Digital Media and NAVEX

Many of our customers — from Marriott to AT&T — start their journey with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud by migrating their data warehousing workloads to the platform. 

For organizations who are considering moving from a legacy data warehouse to Snowflake, are looking to learn more about how the AI Data Cloud can support legacy Hadoop use cases, or are struggling with a cloud data warehouse that just isn’t scaling anymore, it often helps to see how others have done it. 

That’s why we’ve collected these migration success stories to help you get started on your migration to Snowflake. This blog is the first in a three-part series on migrations. Today we’re focusing on customers who migrated from a legacy data warehouse to Snowflake and some of the benefits they saw.

Digital advertiser switches from Teradata and boosts performance by 30%

Core Digital Media originally relied on its outdated Teradata appliance for its increased MicroStrategy and Tableau reporting, data science activity, and evolving data pipeline. However, the leading digital advertiser needed to deliver timely insights to 150 users across marketing, IT, data science, and product, and with its slow performance, it became clear that their  Teradata appliance was approaching end-of-life status.  

Core Digital Media’s BI team began evaluating infrastructure enhancements. The company quickly realized maintaining 10 years’ worth of production data while enabling real-time data ingestion led to an unscalable situation that would have necessitated a data lake. 

The company migrated from its outdated Teradata appliance to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud to resolve performance issues and meet growing data demands. Core Digital Media’s Teradata system struggled to handle the increasing load from reporting, data science and real-time data ingestion. This caused system contention, missed SLAs, delayed report deliveries and significant maintenance overhead. Snowflake's cloud-native architecture offered the scalability and performance Core Digital Media required to eliminate these bottlenecks.

The transition to Snowflake led to a significant performance boost, with BI report generation improving by 30%. Snowflake's separate clusters for ETL, reporting and data science eliminated resource contention. The company also used prebuilt connectors like Apache Kafka and Informatica simplified data integration to deliver better insights across the organization. Within four months, Core Digital Media had fully transitioned to Snowflake, decommissioning Teradata. Snowflake's fully-managed services, including zero-copy cloning, allowed the company to focus on building data-driven applications rather than managing infrastructure.

Snowflake’s scalability also allowed Core Digital Media to process continuous streams of advertising data from Facebook and Google, helping the marketing and analytics teams with real-time insights. Data scientists also benefited from a scalable environment to build machine learning models without fear of system crashes. Snowflake’s flexible architecture and cost-effective per-second pricing lowered the company’s total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for a separate data lake, enabling greater innovation and resilience.

From 10,000 to 1: Consolidating SQL databases into a single platform for better performance

NAVEX, a global governance, risk and compliance (GRC) management system, serves more than 13,000 clients with various products and services that satisfy various GRC needs — from ethics training to third-party risk management. One of its core products uses a single-tenant architecture, which means each client has its own database. That amounts to more than 10,000 unique databases under NAVEX’s system. 

Managing that amount of data (and growing) naturally became a costly, time-consuming and inefficient process. Collecting more than 10,000 databases, for instance, would take 24-36 hours, and the costs of maintaining legacy in-house data centers were growing exponentially. With a desire to move to a cloud-based system and incorporate more automation in their data-processing pipeline, NAVEX needed a platform that could scale to meet their growing needs and improve performance across the board.

The company turned to Snowflake to consolidate those thousands of databases into one multi-tenant solution. That began with migrating those massive stores of data from SQL Server to Snowflake. Using Fivetran and AWS Data Migration Services, along with dbt for transforming, NAVEX found it could ingest and transform each cluster — up to 1,000 client databases, each containing up to 1,000 schemas — in just six hours, a sixfold improvement from other solutions. It also cut costs associated with its legacy system, and thanks to Snowflake’s elastic, cloud-based platform, NAVEX has seen marked improvements in performance and scalability. 

A simpler, better solution 

While a desire to simplify its data foundation drove the move to Snowflake for both Core Digital Media and NAVEX, the companies also saw immediate improvements on speed of delivery, ease of use and costs. Snowflake’s deep well of partners and the growing number of tools that integrate seamlessly with its platform offer the flexibility to tackle each customer’s unique challenges — whether it is consolidating thousands of separate databases or modernizing an outmoded system with a small team. 

To learn more about migrating and modernizing your legacy data platform, visit our Migrate to the AI Data Cloud web page. You can also join our webinar featuring NAVEX, where they’ll talk more about their SQL Server to Snowflake migration success story, or, you can read more customer stories here to find out how companies like CONA, Siemens and Saxo Bank have all found success with Snowflake.