Case study · Insurance
Data Platform Migration to Snowflake
Legacy Oracle DW retired; Snowflake + dbt + Power BI modern stack.
Key results
- TCO -42%
- User concurrency +10x
- Analyst productivity measurable
Context
An insurance holding company running multiple legal entities had an Oracle data warehouse that was expensive, performance-constrained, and politically difficult to modify because entity-level analytics teams had built layers of custom logic.
Challenge
Migrating to Snowflake required preserving every analyst's existing reports numerically while delivering a modern modeling layer that would let downstream work be more maintainable. Without respecting the political structure, the migration would stall.
Approach
Thoughtwave delivered an 8-month Snowflake migration: entity-level partnership on scoping, dbt semantic layer modeling the existing metric logic explicitly for the first time, Power BI consolidation replacing a mix of tools, and analyst training during the transition. The engagement ran discovery through full cutover and legacy retirement.
Outcomes
Total cost of ownership dropped 42% between the Oracle retirement and the modern stack's economics; user concurrency improved 10× eliminating the contention issues that had plagued Oracle workloads; analyst productivity improved measurably — time on data-wrangling dropped, time on analysis increased.
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