7-Eleven, Inc. operates greater than 85,000 shops worldwide, serving thousands and thousands of consumers every single day. Behind that scale sits an equally huge knowledge platform, powering cell 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 information entry, whereas technical debt gathered as 1000’s of jobs relied on hard-coded paths, RDDs, and DBFS mount factors. On the similar time, knowledge sprawl throughout storage areas and legacy workspaces slowed modernization efforts.
The Enterprise Information Platform (EDP) group 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 trying out 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 long run. Centralized entry management, audit logging, lineage, and knowledge discovery would simplify operations and enhance belief in knowledge. A federated structure would enable 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 referred to as a brownfield migration. Years of entrenched code patterns, 1000’s of tables and notebooks, and jobs constructed round an exterior Hive metastore meant {that a} easy lift-and-shift wasn’t potential. The group wanted a structured strategy 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 group deal with what mattered most.
With system tables and lineage insights, the EDP group prioritized high-value workflows whereas de-scoping ~40% of inactive or low-value legacy jobs. This “business-value-first” strategy stored the migration manageable and aligned with stakeholder priorities.
Key steps included:
- Id federation: Transferring 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 threat.
This phased playbook of assess, plan, migrate, validate, and decommission reoriented the venture 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 group 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 belongings. The platform group manages one set of insurance policies as an alternative of many, enhancing each effectivity and safety.
However the advantages go effectively past simplification. With a central catalog, customers throughout enterprise models can now uncover and belief knowledge belongings, see how they join by lineage, and reuse them with confidence as an alternative of recreating experiences. Constructed-in auditability ensures the group can reply questions like “who queried what” in minutes, not days, a essential 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 deal with enterprise outcomes as an alternative of administrative overhead.
On high of those governance enhancements, Unity Catalog has unlocked new capabilities that gas enterprise innovation:
- Delta Sharing and Databricks Clear Rooms energy advertising and marketing 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 models, and supporting innovation at scale.
Migrating to Unity Catalog was not a lift-and-shift venture – it was a strategic reset. With UCX and system tables, we gained visibility, phased our migration, and decreased technical debt. Right this moment, all of our knowledge and AI belongings dwell below 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 group uncovered a number of greatest practices that may information different enterprises tackling advanced migrations:
- Spend money on a radical evaluation upfront: Utilizing UCX and system tables surfaced technical debt early and recognized low-value belongings 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 group adopted a Medallion structure to cut back sprawl, standardize patterns, and eradicate long-standing technical debt.
- Section 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.
