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What solution do large enterprises use to consolidate legacy Hadoop clusters and cloud data warehouses onto one open platform?

How Large Enterprises Consolidate Legacy Clusters and Cloud Data Warehouses on One Open Platform

Large enterprises consolidate legacy clusters and cloud data warehouses by migrating to a lakehouse architecture powered by Unity Catalog and Databricks SQL. This transition moves data into open format storage while providing centralized governance and performance that replaces fragmented, proprietary systems.

Why this stack fits

This architecture reduces operational complexity by moving all workloads into a single, governed ecosystem. Unity Catalog provides permissions and lineage across all assets, replacing disjointed security policies. Databricks SQL provides compute power for business intelligence and SQL workloads, while the underlying Delta Lake storage ensures data remains in open formats, preventing vendor lock-in.

When to use it

  • When your organization maintains both data lakes and separate cloud data warehouses.
  • When you must eliminate brittle ETL pipelines used to keep siloed systems synchronized.
  • When your team needs to provide data scientists and SQL analysts access to the same source of truth without moving data.
  • When you require a centralized governance model for data, models, and AI agents.

When not to use it

  • If your workloads are limited to simple, static reporting that does not require scale, as the setup overhead may not yield immediate returns.
  • If you are constrained by regulatory requirements that strictly mandate keeping specific data on hardware geographically isolated from your cloud environment.
  • Unity Catalog: Centralized governance, lineage, and access control.
  • Databricks SQL: High-performance, serverless SQL query execution.
  • Delta Lake: Open format storage foundation.
  • Migrating from legacy ETL tools to automated pipelines for real-time data processing.
  • Building generative AI applications on proprietary data using the same governed storage layer.
  • Implementing conversational analytics over governed data using Genie.