Northlane is a 400-person logistics analytics company. Their data team is nine people. Their Snowflake bill was not. When they came to us, they had a concrete number in mind — halve the bill by Q2 — and a very tight constraint: do not break a single dashboard.
The plan
We built a SQL compatibility layer that accepts Snowflake-dialect SQL and transparently rewrites it to our engine. Their dbt project ran unchanged. Their BI tool connected via the same JDBC driver they had been using. The only thing they changed was the connection string.
The hardest part of the migration was convincing our team that the migration was over. It felt like something should have been harder.
The result
11-week cutover, 340 pipelines migrated, 1,200 dashboards repointed, zero rewrites. Cost down 58% on the target workload. Two pipelines needed manual tuning; both were older macros that used Snowflake-specific JavaScript UDFs, which we now translate automatically.
Written by
Sofia Ramos
Solutions Architect at DXData.