Snowflake proof of concept

Major Home Builder Leverages Snowflake to Catalyze Change in its Data Environment

Faced with integration limitations in their legacy data warehouse, this home builder turned to Wavicle for strategic guidance and help exploring the capabilities of more modern data storage solutions. With the desire to integrate disparate systems and start to leverage their data for new company insights, they needed a robust solution and, ultimately, selected Snowflake for a series of proof of concept (POC) projects to determine if the cloud data platform could satisfy their requirements.  

The objective of these POC projects was to address immediate integration challenges and assess Snowflake’s viability as a long-term solution for the company’s evolving data and analytics needs and overarching goals. With Wavicle’s help, the home builder was determined to uncover if Snowflake was the appropriate choice to set the foundation for ongoing data storage and management.  

Legacy data management challenges 

The home builder’s existing data storage solution, SQL Server, lacked integration capabilities with many of their third-party systems, which created operational inefficiencies. The short-term solution to bridging the gap between SQL Server and other internal systems involved extracting and depositing data into a data warehouse, but the home builder needed a more advanced alternative.  

In exploring their options, the home builder turned to Snowflake due to its extensive native integrations, making it a potential solution to increase the efficiency of their data storage, processing, and reporting processes. During this initial exploration, they realized the need for a structured approach to incorporate Snowflake into their architecture and effectively evaluate which of their most pressing data needs and desired analytics capabilities Snowflake would be able to support.  

The home builder needed assistance from a team with deep Snowflake expertise and turned to Wavicle. With Wavicle’s help, they aimed to understand the feasibility of migrating from their current data warehouse to Snowflake and leveraging the cloud data platform for their ongoing data storage needs through the execution of a small set of POC projects.  

Strategic POC projects for platform evaluation  

In a 12-week collaboration, Wavicle partnered with the home builder and Snowflake to establish a trial environment, identify appropriate use cases to evaluate Snowflake’s capabilities, and implement those POC projects in order to gauge results and make an educated decision about the future of the company’s data architecture.

Initial efforts involved understanding the home builder’s requirements and identifying four use cases to prioritize in the initial proof of concept projects. These included:

• Enabling access to crucial marketing data: Capturing data about website visits and interactions through Segment, a customer data platform, and processing it in Snowflake to enable deeper understanding and analysis of customer behaviors.  
• Testing on-prem to cloud: Migrating data from the company’s on-prem AS400 server into Snowflake to evaluate the feasibility of a future full data migration.  
• Measuring reporting performance: Evaluating the performance of five representative reports for the company, including complex queries and large result sets, by recreating SQL in Snowflake for reports previously run through Tableau and the on-prem server.  
• Improving devOps pipelines: Integrating CI/CD Snowflake scripts into a seamless deployment process across different environments to evaluate performance. 

With these four main use cases in mind, Wavicle collaborated with the home builder’s technical team and Snowflake to build the Snowflake test environment, access on-prem systems, and build the necessary pipelines to move data into Snowflake from Segment and the on-prem legacy system, ensuring adherence to best practices and security measures. Wavicle’s consultants also built integrated DevOps pipelines, conducted a code walkthrough, and provided detailed knowledge transfer sessions for the home builder’s data and analytics team. The project concluded with delivery of the four POC projects, metric documentation, a comprehensive cost estimation, and a thorough evaluation of Snowflake’s performance for the four initial use cases.  

Leveraging the strong technical partnership with Snowflake, Wavicle ensured a seamless demo experience, preventing interruptions and ensuring the Snowflake environment was customized to the company’s needs. Beyond technical validation, Wavicle facilitated a crucial partnership, helping the home builder establish a collaborative relationship with Snowflake. This strategic connection ensures ongoing support and alignment as the home builder advances their comprehensive data strategy.  

In addition, Wavicle provided a detailed scoreboard for comparing and evaluating Snowflake alternatives, including Synapse, Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, and Teradata Vantage. 

Envisioned transformations from Snowflake integration  

Wavicle’s collaboration with the home builder provided the insight the home builder needed into Snowflake’s viability as a core part of their data and analytics architecture, including strategic planning, meticulous testing, and knowledge transfer. Through a thorough evaluation of the platform and the four POC use cases, as well as a series of knowledge transfer sessions educating the home builder’s team about Snowflake strengths and nuances, the company gained a transparent understanding of Snowflake’s capabilities and associated costs.  

With the POC projects complete, the home builder is employing a phased adoption approach, testing additional use cases to determine further the feasibility of a comprehensive migration to Snowflake across all operations while already utilizing select existing use cases like the Segment marketing data integration. Wavicle’s comprehensive examination affirmed Snowflake’s capabilities – seamless integration with Segment, effective data processing, and robust handling of historical and incremental data at scale. 

This collaboration addressed immediate data challenges and positioned the home builder for future success, leveraging Snowflake’s capabilities within the context of their changing data environment. Wavicle’s multifaceted support, from use case development to relationship cultivation with Snowflake, has empowered the home builder to make informed decisions, ensuring the effective utilization of Snowflake in their data strategy.