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Infocepts Flash Enables 3X Faster Teradata to Databricks Migration for a North American Retailer

Facing a tight deadline before holiday sales, a prominent retailer partnered with Infocepts to migrate its legacy Teradata platform to Databricks on Azure. Infocepts’ proven approach and automation tools enabled a 30% cost reduction in the Teradata migration and improved operational efficiency, ensuring timely insights during high-volume periods.

The Challenge

The retailer’s existing on-premises legacy data platform built on Teradata was expensive and complex to manage, lacked scalability, causing significant operational hurdles. During peak seasons, data processing jobs stretched beyond 8 hours, hampering the ability to deliver timely insights and critical reports. IT teams were bogged down with maintaining daily operations and troubleshooting performance issues.

Facing a tight deadline before the holiday sales season, the retailer required a robust, proven solution to complete their Teradata migration to cloud efficiently while maintaining data accuracy and security.

Adding to the complexity was the scale of the migration—spanning 300 tables, 700 views, complex data processing code, and over 800 GB of historical data. The company also had 1,500 business intelligence reports connected to their legacy data warehouse built on Teradata.

They needed to modernize their data platform and rewire reports quickly, with minimal disruption to ongoing operations.

The Outcome

The retailer’s Teradata migration to the cloud, led by Infocepts, delivered faster performance, cost savings, and improved operational efficiency.

  • The Teradata migration was completed three months faster than initially projected, and at 30% lower cost.
  • The solution was delivered eight weeks before the critical holiday season, ensuring the business was fully operational on the new cloud infrastructure.
  • Daily report delivery times improved by 6 hours, providing decision-makers with timely insights during peak sales periods.
  • The new system saw an 80% reduction in job failures, ensuring smoother day-to-day operations.

Additionally, the retailer now benefits from the full advantages of Teradata migration to cloud computing, including enhanced security, scalability, and performance—positioning them for long-term growth and flexibility.

The Solution

Databricks on Azure was the client’s platform of choice for modernization, and Infocepts supported the transition with our Flash Databricks Migrate.

Infocepts’ approach started with designing a robust blueprint built on Medallion Architecture, focusing on centralized job cluster configurations and built-in fault tolerance. This architecture ensured resilience and high performance, especially during high-volume processing periods like the holiday season. The migration also involved rewiring MicroStrategy reports to pull data from the new Databricks platform, replacing the legacy Teradata source.

Infocepts followed a structured, four-phase approach:

Blueprint Definition: We developed an architecture blueprint, reviewed policies, and established governance frameworks to ensure compliance and scalability.

Detailed Design and Planning: The team mapped data transformation rules, defined orchestration strategies, and outlined the migration scope. We also prioritized data validation, preparing test cases for historical and incremental data.

Execution and Migration: Infocepts utilized its Flash Migrate toolkit to streamline and expedite key migration tasks, significantly enhancing efficiency.

  • Automated polling, provisioning, and data loading reduced development time by 40%.
  • The toolkit auto-generated 300 tables and 700 views while converting legacy SQL to Databricks-compatible formats seamlessly.
  • Historical data was efficiently transferred from Teradata to Databricks using our toolkit’s automated data transfer utility.
  • Our automated validator compared data across Teradata and Databricks tables and compared over 1,500 MicroStrategy reports before and after migration, promptly identifying and resolving any discrepancies.

Infocepts worked closely with the retailer’s IT team to ensure seamless integration with DevOps pipelines and real-time monitoring.

Rollout and Adoption: Following rigorous testing, Infocepts provided support through user acceptance testing (UAT) and post-go-live monitoring to ensure the Azure Databricks migration system met performance and operational expectations.

The Outcome

The retailer’s cloud transformation, led by Infocepts, delivered faster performance, cost savings, and improved operational efficiency.

  • The migration was completed three months faster than initially projected, and at 30% lower cost.
  • The solution was delivered eight weeks before the critical holiday season, ensuring the business was fully operational on the new cloud infrastructure.
  • Daily report delivery times improved by 6 hours, providing decision-makers with timely insights during peak sales periods.
  • The new system saw an 80% reduction in job failures, ensuring smoother day-to-day operations.

Additionally, the retailer now benefits from the full advantages of cloud computing, including enhanced security, scalability, and performance—positioning them for long-term growth and flexibility.

Sign up for Infocepts’ Databricks Jumpstart Assessment to learn how we can help you accelerate your cloud transformation and migrations with proven tools and expertise.

About the Client

A prominent North American retailer with over 600 stores across the U.S. and Canada, our client is renowned for its wide range of pop culture merchandise, novelty items, and unique gifts.

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