About the Client

The Client provides best-in-class services for leading hedge funds around the world. Their solution included fund administration, integrated risk & portfolio management, middle office services, tax support, regulatory & compliance reporting, and complete shadow accounting services, underpinned by SOC 1 certified controls.

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.

Challenge and Wins

Challenge

Reporting and Analytics were an important part of the Client’s administration platform. However, these data-hungry applications were bottlenecked by the limitations imposed by SQL Server. The Client could see that Snowflake would provide the scale they needed to eliminate the limitations imposed by a fixed hardware solution. However, making such a transition appeared to be a daunting task to their team, as many years of work had been put into their SQL Server Data Warehouse. While the desire to move to the cloud was high, the team was looking for wins that they could obtain in the current fiscal year.

Win 1: Mirroring

To build an immediate win, Intricity designed a reference architecture that used the first step in Intricity’s “Do No Harm” DW Migration solution. (see https://view.attach.io/r1lxy6l2X) This step produces immediate value because the operational benefits of being on Snowflake can be realized by end users instantly. This strategy focuses on replicating the schema and data on the old Data Warehouse into the new target platform. The ETL and other core data integration routines remain untouched in this step.

Win 2: Non-Disruptive Performance

As the Client began to reroute their BI content to point to Snowflake rather than SQL Server, the users of that content saw an immediate change in performance. Not only was the data access faster, but the concurrency barriers were now a non-issue. To the community of users, it simply appeared that their analytics suddenly got a shot in the arm.

Win 3: Room to Redesign Integration Logic

While the replication solution provided an immediate fix to performance issues, the Client would ultimately want to take SQL Server out of the picture. To do this, the integration logic needed to be rewired to point directly to Snowflake. While this would be a pressure cooker situation in most projects, the solution satisfied the user's need for performance and allowed the Client to take its time converting the integration logic. After Intricity designed and deployed the replication solution, the Client team was able to take over and work over an extended timeline, greatly reducing impacts on the conversion budget.