At a Glance

Industry	Global E-Commerce & Digital Retail
Client	A world-leading e-commerce company
Migration	PL/SQL Reporting Engine → AWS Glue (serverless ETL)
Legacy Source	PL/SQL-based enterprise reporting engine
Target Platform	AWS Glue on AWS
Consumption Layer	Enterprise BI/analytics tool (data delivered as input)
Scope	Hundreds of production reports migrated end to end

WORLD-LEADING E-COMMERCE COMPANY

Migrating a Legacy PL/SQL Reporting Engine to AWS Glue for a World-Leading E-Commerce Company

Client Overview

A World-Leading E-Commerce Company at Global Scale

The client is a world-leading e-commerce company operating at global scale, serving millions of customers and processing enormous volumes of transactional and operational data every day. Their reporting environment underpins day-to-day operational decisions across multiple business functions, making both accuracy and reliability non-negotiable.

Because these reports are woven into daily operations, any modernization effort had to guarantee output parity with the legacy system: every figure the business already trusted needed to match exactly after migration.

Customer Storeis

Executive Summary

A Serverless ETL Foundation for Enterprise Reporting

A world-leading e-commerce company relied on a legacy PL/SQL-based reporting engine to power hundreds of business-critical operational reports. Over time, this layer had become expensive to maintain, difficult to scale with growing data volumes, and increasingly disconnected from the organization's modern cloud and analytics strategy.

DataTerrain was engaged to modernize this environment by re-platforming the reporting data pipeline onto AWS Glue and delivering clean, curated, analytics-ready datasets directly into the client's BI tool. Rather than a lift-and-shift, the engagement followed a disciplined, methodical approach: beginning with a deep understanding of the source, moving through careful data analysis, and progressing to design, migration, validation, and delivery.

The result was a fully modernized, serverless ETL foundation that reproduced the legacy system's exact business outputs while dramatically improving scalability, maintainability, and readiness for future analytics initiatives, with hundreds of reports successfully migrated.

The Challenge

A Legacy PL/SQL Engine That Couldn't Keep Pace

The existing reporting stack was built on a legacy PL/SQL-based reporting engine that had accumulated years of embedded business logic. This created several compounding challenges:

Maintenance burden

Complex, tightly-coupled PL/SQL logic that was hard to change, test, and hand over between teams.

Scalability limits

The legacy layer struggled to keep pace with growing data volumes and processing windows.

Cloud misalignment

The reporting pipeline sat outside the organization's modern AWS-based data strategy.

Opaque logic

Critical transformation rules were embedded in procedural code, with limited documentation of the source-to-output lineage.

Analytics friction

Delivering data into the BI tool required brittle intermediate steps rather than clean, governed datasets.

The objective was clear: migrate the entire reporting pipeline to AWS Glue, preserve every business output precisely, and feed the results into the BI tool as reliable, ready-to-consume inputs.

Our Approach

How DataTerrain Solved Each Challenge

DataTerrain addressed every challenge head-on: converting the legacy PL/SQL logic into a modern, serverless AWS Glue foundation while preserving the exact business outputs the organization already trusted.

Maintenance burden

Re-engineered the sprawling parent-and-child job structure into a single reusable, parameterized framework, with each transformation defined once and invoked consistently, so changes are made in one place and are easy to test and hand over.

Scalability limits

Re-platformed onto serverless AWS Glue for elastic, cloud-native processing that scales with data volumes and keeps pipelines running comfortably within operational windows.

Cloud misalignment

Built the target architecture natively on AWS Glue, fully aligned with the client's AWS data platform and cloud strategy.

Opaque logic

Reverse-engineered the procedural logic line by line and documented source-to-output lineage for every report, capturing each business rule in plain, verifiable terms and standardizing it into reusable patterns.

Analytics friction

Delivered curated, governed, analytics-ready datasets straight into the BI tool: scheduled reports served fast from pre-loaded tables, and live reports served via direct queries for real-time needs.

Zero-defect delivery

Reconciled every output row-by-row and value-by-value against the legacy system, applying deliberate patterns (such as for numeric rounding) to preserve exact business behavior.

Before & After

From Locked-In Procedural Code to a Governed Cloud Pipeline

Before — Legacy Environment

Legacy PL/SQL-based reporting engine

Logic locked in procedural code

Hard to scale with data growth

Brittle path into the BI tool

High maintenance overhead

Outside the cloud strategy

After — Modernized on AWS

Serverless AWS Glue ETL pipelines

Documented, standardized, reusable transformations

Elastic, cloud-native processing

Clean, governed datasets delivered directly to BI

Maintainable framework built for change

Fully aligned with the AWS data platform

Results & Outcomes

Outcomes That Mattered to the Business

Complete Modernization

The legacy PL/SQL-based reporting engine was fully re-platformed onto AWS Glue, in line with the client's cloud strategy.

Exact Business Parity

Migrated outputs matched the trusted legacy results, so the business could adopt the new pipeline with confidence.

Scalable & Maintainable

A reusable framework replaced tightly-coupled procedural code, making future changes faster and safer.

Analytics-Ready Delivery

Curated datasets now flow directly into the BI tool as clean, governed inputs.

Bottom Line

Why Choose DataTerrain

DataTerrain specializes in automated, any-to-any BI migration and modernization. With 17+ years of experience, 400+ customers, and 27,000+ reports migrated, DataTerrain brings a proven, disciplined methodology to complex modernization programs, combining deep source analysis, reusable engineering frameworks, and rigorous validation to deliver modern platforms without disrupting the business outputs organizations already depend on.

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