7-Eleven, Inc. operates greater than 85,000 shops worldwide, serving hundreds of thousands of shoppers each day. Behind that scale sits an equally huge knowledge platform, powering cellular checkout, loyalty packages, on-demand supply, and AI-driven personalization.
By 2023, that platform was displaying pressure. Because the platform scaled, legacy architectural patterns, together with an exterior Hive metastore and workspace-level governance fashions, started to restrict visibility and consistency. Metadata was fragmented throughout environments, making knowledge discovery tougher and lowering belief. Compliance groups lacked a unified, account-level view of knowledge entry, whereas technical debt amassed as hundreds of jobs trusted hard-coded paths, RDDs, and DBFS mount factors. On the identical time, knowledge sprawl throughout storage areas and legacy workspaces slowed modernization efforts.
The Enterprise Information Platform (EDP) staff at 7-Eleven knew that migrating to Unity Catalog would centralize entry management, simplify compliance, and allow a federated knowledge structure. On this weblog, we’ll stroll by why we migrated to Unity Catalog, how UCX and system tables helped us reorient the migration, and the advantages we’re seeing now that we’ve standardized on UC.
You may study extra about 7-Eleven’s migration to Unity Catalog by testing their session at Information + AI Summit 2025.
Constructing a Future-Proof Information Governance Technique
For 7-Eleven, Unity Catalog was not nearly addressing governance gaps; it was about constructing a basis for the longer term. Centralized entry management, audit logging, lineage, and knowledge discovery would simplify operations and enhance belief in knowledge. A federated structure would permit enterprise domains to innovate independently whereas nonetheless aligning to enterprise requirements. Unity Catalog additionally promised to standardize enterprise metrics by a semantic layer, guaranteeing constant KPIs throughout analytics and reporting.
Nonetheless, 7-Eleven confronted what they known as a brownfield migration. Years of entrenched code patterns, hundreds of tables and notebooks, and jobs constructed round an exterior Hive metastore meant {that a} easy lift-and-shift wasn’t attainable. The staff wanted a structured option to assess their property, remediate technical debt, and migrate with out disrupting each day operations.
Steps to a seamless migration with UCX and system tables
7-Eleven turned to UCX, Databricks Labs’ open supply migration assistant, to interchange guide effort with structured workflows. UCX crawled their property, delivered a complete stock of tables, jobs, and permissions, and flagged blockers with a “readiness rating.” This visibility helped the staff concentrate on what mattered most.
With system tables and lineage insights, the EDP staff prioritized high-value workflows whereas de-scoping ~40% of inactive or low-value legacy jobs. This “business-value-first” strategy saved the migration manageable and aligned with stakeholder priorities.
Key steps included:
- Identification federation: Shifting from workspace-local to account-level teams, with UCX automating permission mapping, even throughout nested hierarchies.
- Medallion structure redesign: Remapping storage into bronze, silver, and gold layers throughout migration.
- Incremental migration with sync and reverse-sync: Permitting Hive and Unity Catalog to coexist throughout transition, minimizing downtime and danger.
This phased playbook of assess, plan, migrate, validate, and decommission reoriented the mission from a frightening problem to a structured transformation.
Stronger governance, sooner innovation with Databricks Unity Catalog
With Unity Catalog in place, 7-Eleven has dramatically simplified governance and unlocked new enterprise capabilities. By eliminating greater than 40% of redundant workflows, the staff rationalized its knowledge property and decreased operational overhead. Governance is now unified, with centralized audit logging, fine-grained safety, and lineage monitoring throughout all knowledge and AI property. The platform staff manages one set of insurance policies as a substitute of many, enhancing each effectivity and safety.
However the advantages go effectively past simplification. With a central catalog, customers throughout enterprise items can now uncover and belief knowledge property, see how they join by lineage, and reuse them with confidence as a substitute of recreating studies. Constructed-in auditability ensures the staff can reply questions like “who queried what” in minutes, not days, a important win for compliance.
Collaboration has additionally accelerated. Information scientists, analysts, and engineers now work from the identical ruled platform, sharing knowledge seamlessly throughout domains. This consistency reduces errors, boosts productiveness, and frees groups to concentrate on enterprise outcomes as a substitute of administrative overhead.
On high of those governance enhancements, Unity Catalog has unlocked new capabilities that gasoline enterprise innovation:
- Delta Sharing and Databricks Clear Rooms energy advertising optimization and safe knowledge monetization.
- Serverless clusters eradicate guide cluster administration.
- Self-service analytics with AI/BI Genie Areas and federated domains give enterprise groups direct entry to the insights they want.
Classes from 7-Eleven’s UC migration
7-Eleven’s UC migration is greater than a technical improve. It’s a cornerstone of their digital transformation: simplifying governance, enabling federation throughout enterprise items, and supporting innovation at scale.
Migrating to Unity Catalog was not a lift-and-shift mission – it was a strategic reset. With UCX and system tables, we gained visibility, phased our migration, and decreased technical debt. At present, all of our knowledge and AI property stay beneath a unified governance mannequin, giving us the belief and agility to scale AI throughout 7-Eleven. — Ganesh Susarla, Director, Structure and Governance, 7-Eleven
As a part of this journey, the Enterprise Information Platform staff uncovered a number of finest practices that may information different enterprises tackling complicated migrations:
- Put money into an intensive evaluation upfront: Utilizing UCX and system tables surfaced technical debt early and recognized low-value property to de-scope, shrinking the general migration footprint.
- Migrate identities and permissions first: Establishing account-level governance early created a clear basis that simplified each downstream step.
- Use the migration as a possibility to modernize: The staff adopted a Medallion structure to scale back sprawl, standardize patterns, and eradicate long-standing technical debt.
- Part the work to attenuate disruption: Sync and reverse-sync allowed Hive and Unity Catalog to coexist throughout transition, guaranteeing day-to-day operations continued uninterrupted.