Oracle Data Platform Consulting Services
Case study
Global retailer minimized legacy Oracle analytics costs
Hybrid analytics separation architecture slashed infrastructure spend.
Pythian separated workloads by moving analytics to Google BigQuery and transactions to Oracle Cloud.
As market demand accelerated, a global multi-brand retailer's legacy, on-premise Oracle Exadata infrastructure was rapidly outpaced by the volume of new e-commerce data, creating reporting delays during critical holiday traffic surges. To resolve this performance bottleneck and eliminate a looming hardware refresh, engineers deployed a hybrid architecture to separate processing workloads, extracting online analytical structures into Google BigQuery and safely transitioning transactional systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Merchandising and financial planning teams now generate automated inventory models on fresh demand signals instead of waiting hours for timed-out reports.
Pythian turned our aging data infrastructure into a highly elastic analytics engine, giving our teams immediate visibility into holiday demand signals."
Director of Merchandising Operations & Analytics
Global Multi-Brand Retailer
$1.8M
Data infrastructure savings
90%
Reduction in query times
99.9%
Availability in peak seasons
Transform aging legacy databases into elastic cloud architectures.
Holiday shopping traffic surges exposed critical computing bottlenecks on an aging on-premise enterprise data estate.
Pythian built a risk-managed hybrid data architecture to isolate transactional systems from high-concurrency analytical pipelines.
Our dashboards simply couldn't keep up with Black Friday traffic, leaving our merchandising teams completely blind during our biggest sales window of the year until Pythian stepped in."
Director of Merchandising Operations & Analytics
Global Multi-Brand Retailer
Mixed workloads degraded throughput
Analytics and transactional tasks operated within a single cluster, forcing query report generation times from 20 minutes to three hours under heavy seasonal concurrency.
Looming support deadlines forced hardware ultimatums
Aging on-premise Exadata hardware sat 18 months from final end of support, presenting an expensive $3M rack replacement requirement.
Hardcoded app systems trapped data in old databases
Over ten years of building internal software left 500,000 lines of historical PL/SQL code deeply tangled up with outdated hardware and rigid database structures.
Old inventory data delayed seasonal planning
Dashboard timeouts forced the merchandising team to restock inventory using online sales data that was six hours out of date.
Right-sized cores eliminated $800K in immediate software licensing waste.
Pythian Consultants executed a four-week technical assessment utilizing automatic workload repository (AWR) baselines to analyze storage metrics and system health. Deactivating unused options like Advanced Security and In-Memory eliminated $800K in immediate software licensing waste. This initial cost avoidance phase fully funded the broader cloud transformation from day one.
Migrating analytics to BigQuery unlocked self-service business intelligence.
Engineers extracted all historical analytical reporting structures out of the shared on-premise environment and moved them to a high-concurrency cloud platform. Legacy Informatica and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) pipelines shifted cleanly to automated Airflow, Fivetran, and dbt workflows. Business groups now execute complex data models and run self-service business intelligence using Looker dashboards.
Transitioning transaction platforms to OCI secured elastic cloud scale and stability.
Operational point-of-sale (POS) and order management databases remained on Oracle architectures to safeguard application dependencies. Transitioning these online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads to Exadata Cloud Service on OCI captured elastic scale. Overhauling the core infrastructure preserves ongoing system stability while securing maximum cloud efficiency.
Automated database translation bypassed roadblocks and optimized query patterns.
Automated tools converted 70% of the legacy PL/SQL code using Google Batch SQL Translator to bypass generalist migration roadblocks. Specialized database engineers refactored the remaining 30% of advanced packages and autonomous transactions manually. Restructuring the old query patterns into native cloud columnar strategies drastically lowered processing friction.
Modernize legacy database engines to maximize operational efficiency.
Maximize the value of your Oracle Cloud ecosystem.
As a premier infrastructure and data services partner, Pythian bridges the gap between complex enterprise workloads and high-concurrency cloud environments.
Our expertise spans the entire Oracle ecosystem—backed by decades of enterprise experience, certified architects, and world-renowned Oracle ACEs. We combine deep database, cloud, and analytics mastery with a tailored approach to modernize your workloads, optimize infrastructure performance, and maximize the value of your Oracle investment.
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