The client is a leading full flowsheet technology and service provider to the global mining and cement industries that sought to enhance operational independence and efficiency by separating data warehouses.
About the Client
Problem Statement
After two years, the situation changed significantly:
- The client’s shared data warehouse led to inter-departmental dependencies, complicating data management and report sharing.
- Modifications for one department risked affecting the other, hindering autonomy and potential divestment efforts.
The above led to a shift in demands. To address this challenge comprehensively, the client aimed to establish separate data environments, mitigating operational risks and enhancing departmental autonomy.
The client trusted Scalefree once again to implement the new requirements.
The Challenge
Separating the data warehouse while maintaining operational continuity posed challenges including data integrity risks, transition disruptions, and the need to reconfigure CI/CD pipelines for department-specific requirements. The challenges included:
- Ensuring departmental autonomy within the shared data warehouse environment
- Mitigating risks of data integrity and operational interruptions during separation
- Implementing separate CI/CD pipelines while maintaining efficiency and consistency
The Solution
After comprehensive consulting with the client and analyzing the new requirements, we agreed on the below solution:
- Establishing separate namespaces within the Snowflake database to isolate departmental data
- Creating distinct dbt projects, ADF pipelines, and Docker images for each department to ensure segregated data processing environments
- Splitting up automated CI/CD pipelines and tailoring them to the unique needs of each department.
Tangible Results for the Client
The Scalefree solution yielded:
- Reduced data conflicts and disruptions
- Boosted departmental independence
- Improved departmental agility and responsiveness to data insights
- Removed negotiation needs for report changes
- Simplified potential divestment with transferable DWH solutions
Technologies involved
- Snowflake
- dbt (Data Build Tool)
- Azure Data Factory (ADF)
- Docker
- Azure DevOps
