Case Study: Redshift migration to Snowflake

“Who is Snowflake?” to “Snowflake Customer” in a Week

About CLIENT

This CLIENT is a financial tech company which enables banks to actively manage their portfolios by rating, valuing, buying and selling loans through their technology platform. CLIENT is headquartered in Boston, MA with offices located throughout the United States, Europe, and South America.CLIENT is a pioneer and innovator in the commercial and residential loan industries. Upon inception in 2000, CLIENT developed and deployed the first online loan sale platform. This groundbreaking platform enabled millions of imaged documents to be accessed virtually through a secure document sharing application.

About Intricity

Intricity is a team of specialized Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence experts. The team members at Intricity have been handpicked over the course of 20 years, and represent the top talent globally in Data oriented disciplines.

Redshift to Snowflake

Challenge

Intricity was introduced to CLIENT as part of a query optimization engagement being conducted by Looker. Their BI layer was leveraging Redshift to run the queries. At this time CLIENT was building their next generation platform but kept running into significant issues with the query performance for their dashboards. Intricity was asked by Looker to investigate the queries being issued to see if any optimizations could be done to their environment.

Several factors were contributing to the query latency

1. The data was not well modeled to deliver performant queries
2. Their dashboards were very large creating a large body of queries to kick off all at once
3. The SQL being generated by the LookML was producing some case statements which made the queries very expansive

After reviewing the queries, it was clear improvements could be made, however, the queries were not so egregious as to justify the slow responses from Redshift. Intricity needed a baseline to determine whether something else was going on. The Intricity team decided to run a mini investigation using Snowflake as the baseline. Having conducted so many POCs, Intricity had all the environmental details ready for such an investigation, and got approval from CLIENT to attempt the comparison.

Win

Within a day of focused work, Intricity conducted a cold migration of their Redshift environment to Snowflake and conducted query testing for all the Looker content. From this work Intricity pointed their core dashboard to the Snowflake Environment. With no tuning in Snowflake, the following benchmarks were obtained:

Intricity shared the query times with CLIENT which delighted their CIO. Within that week Intricity reconfigured their data orchestration layer and LookML to all point to Snowflake. CLIENT became a Snowflake customer for their current and future landscape development within that week. “Not every Redshift migration is this straightforward, but since we had already been working on their data set, we were able to make quick work of the migration and show Snowflake was a no brainer.” -Glenn Hillam, Intricity Sr. Solution Architect

Call to Action

To schedule time to discuss your landscape with an Intricity specialist, go to https://www.intricity.com/contact-uss and register to talk with a specialist. Or call the office near you.