Legacy Data Warehouse to BigQuery

Modernizing a decade-old on-premise data warehouse to Google BigQuery, unlocking real-time analytics and massive cost savings.

Legacy DW to BigQuery Migration

The Challenge

A leading retail company was operating a legacy on-premise data warehouse that had grown over 10 years to hold petabytes of sales, inventory, and customer data. They faced significant challenges:

  • Prohibitively expensive hardware refresh cycles every 3-4 years
  • Complex ETL processes taking 12+ hours to complete daily
  • Limited ability to perform real-time analytics
  • Siloed data preventing cross-functional insights
  • Specialized skills required for proprietary query languages

Our Approach

CloudBrainy executed a phased migration strategy that ensured business continuity while modernizing the entire data platform:

  • Comprehensive data profiling and quality assessment
  • Schema redesign optimized for BigQuery's columnar architecture
  • BigQuery Transfer Service implementation for bulk migration
  • Real-time streaming pipelines with Dataflow
  • Modern BI layer with Looker integration
  • Parallel run period for validation and reconciliation

Key Deliverables

BigQuery Data Platform

Fully managed analytics platform with 5+ PB of data

Real-time Pipelines

Streaming ingestion with sub-second latency

Looker Dashboards

50+ self-service analytics dashboards

ETL Modernization

Dataform-based transformation pipelines

Results & Impact

70%
Cost Reduction vs On-Premise
100x
Faster Query Performance
Real-time
Analytics Capability
500+
Self-service Users Enabled

Technologies Used

Google BigQuery Cloud Dataflow Dataform Looker BigQuery Transfer Service Cloud Pub/Sub