Welcoming BladeBridge to Databricks: Accelerating Data Warehouse Migrations to Lakehouse

Databricks welcomes BladeBridge, a proven provider of AI-powered migration solutions for enterprise data warehouses. Together, Databricks and BladeBridge will help enterprises accelerate the work required to migrate legacy data warehouses like Oracle, SQL Server, Snowflake, and Redshift to Databricks SQL (DBSQL), the data warehouse built on Databricks' category-defining lakehouse. BladeBridge will provide customers with clear insight into the scope of conversion, configurable code transpiling, LLM-powered conversion, and easy validation of migrated systems.

Five years ago, we created Databricks SQL to realize our vision of a lakehouse architecture, bringing the scalability and efficiency of data lakes to data warehousing. Since that time, the industry has embraced the lakehouse as the data architecture of the future, with Databricks SQL as its clear leader. Already, over 10,000 enterprises around the globe have adopted Databricks SQL to deliver record-setting performance, 9x better efficiency, and simplicity that legacy solutions could not provide. We also continue to integrate AI throughout Databricks SQL to deliver more natural-language capabilities and predictive optimizations. Today, Databricks SQL powers tools like Power BI, Tableau and dbt, and has cemented its place as the fastest-growing product in Databricks' history with a $600M revenue run rate.

Analysts also recognize Databricks as a market leader. For example, Forrester has recognized Databricks as a Leader with the highest scores in both current offering and strategy categories in The Forrester Wave™: Data Lakehouses, Q2 2024.

Already, BladeBridge is a key technology provider to system integrators like Accenture, Capgemini, Celebal Technologies, and Tredence, with proven deployments across hundreds of customers. And now, customers everywhere will be able to significantly reduce cost and lower risk when modernizing their data infrastructure away from proprietary, expensive, and siloed platforms that have defined the history of data warehousing.

What is BladeBridge?

BladeBridge provides an AI-enhanced approach to migrate over 20 legacy data warehouses and ETL tools - including Teradata, Oracle, Snowflake, SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Hive - more than 50% faster than traditional approaches.

BladeBridge saves customers months of work by automatically building a summary of all ETL and database assets in just a few hours, delivering a full report of the migration’s scope and complexity. Additionally, automated query testing between the legacy system and Databricks SQL identifies discrepancies early for quick remediation in the conversion process.

Next, conversion between systems uses a configuration-driven approach that easily accounts for differences between the legacy architecture and Databricks SQL. Importantly, the approach ensures that customers retain full ownership of the conversion patterns, so configurations can always be updated if new requirements emerge at later stages of the migration.

BladeBridge's AI-driven conversions account for all legacy ETL, SQL and other code. When unit tests fail for any component, the configuration files are simply adapted to resolve the errors. This provides a fast, iterative process that allows the vast majority of conversions to be handled with configuration instructions alone.

Proven enterprise success with quick and efficient migrations to Databricks

Thomas International’s costly Snowflake environment could not handle real-time data and only supported SQL. To accomplish their data strategy ambitions, they required a scalable environment that allowed data scientists to leverage their skills in Python and R. Databricks provided Thomas with a unified, scalable architecture for data, analytics, and AI. Now, data scientists are innovating new solutions from customer segmentation models and prototyping predictive analytics to fuzzy matching algorithms and social network analysis with a 40% increase in development productivity compared to the legacy Snowflake platform.

Another customer, VGZ, had a legacy cloud data warehouse that created bottlenecks, slowing product timelines and increasing costs. Resource sharing among teams led to inefficiencies, while outdated governance frameworks complicated security. These limitations made innovating and scaling effectively in a data-driven landscape difficult. Databricks SQL streamlined data access and reporting for VGZ, allowing teams to deliver insights faster and better meet customer needs. Having a unified platform has eliminated bottlenecks and improved collaboration, directly supporting quicker, data-driven decisions, leading to a 30% improvement in time to market for new data products.

Accelerating your data warehouse migrations

In the coming weeks, we intend to make BladeBridge freely available to every organization and partner.

Additionally, 40+ system integration partners, including Accenture, Capgemini, Celebal Technologies, and Tredence, already have BladeBridge expertise, and Databricks will rapidly scale BladeBridge expertise to the thousands of other system integrators in the Databricks partner ecosystem.

Read more about the Databricks approach to migrations on the Migrations page. You can also contact our Professional Services team for a free migration assessment.

If you are a Databricks partner, you can access BladeBridge migration training and enablement in the Partner Academy.