Teradata to Snowflake Migration

Snowflake Advantage

• Modern cloud data warehouse with intuitive and automotive features like Compressing Data, Statistic Collection, Workload Management, and Disaster Recovery instead of DBA-driven data warehouse like Teradata
• Multi-cluster cloud infrastructure that separates compute from storage
• Enables enterprises to automatically and instantly scale their infrastructure
• No software or hardware to install, configure or manage

Teradata Migration Considerations

• ETL pipelines to push data to Teradata
• Teradata Data Model
• Visualization tools to pull data out of Teradata
• Client applications dependent on data from Teradata
• DevOps and tooling around Teradata.

Migration Steps

• Databases and Tables to be migrated
• Users, Roles, and applications access to the tables and databases
• Scripts and Applications responsible for data load
• Scripts and Applications responsible for data pull

• Migrate low-impact tables to the business first
• End-to-end ingestion, transformation, and consumption of the tables
• Incorporate automated scripts and tools for migration

• Export DDL scripts for Teradata tables, views and sequences
• Create Snowflake equivalent DDL
• Skip Teradata system tables like DBC, TD_SYSGPL, TD_SYSXML
• Directly code the data type conversions into the script instead of doing any manual search and replace process

• Extract data from Teradata tables using Teradata Parallel Transporter (TPT)
• Move files to S3 or Blob storage or Cloud storage
• Load data to Snowflake

• Connect each source of data to Snowflake while it is still writing to Teradata.
• Test applications in parallel and ensure a seamless transition.

• Run two parallel versions of each application during the migration – one which continues consuming data from Teradata and another consuming data from Snowflake.

• Run parallel validation with Teradata and Snowflake

• Decommission Teradtata