Unifying multi-domain airport data landscape with Databricks

The global airport and travel retail group's data platform served a wide array of departments including finance, HR, operations, and retail—each operating semi-independently, with their own analytics pipelines, reporting dashboards, and access models. Over time, this led to fragmented governance, inconsistent access controls, and operational inefficiencies.

The team leveraged Unity Catalog to centralize data governance while maintaining business continuity during he data migration process. This was achieved through:

• Business-aligned catalogs: Catalogs were structured by business units with Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers - streamlining data ownership, data lineage tracking, and access control.
• Dual metastore sync: Delta tables were mirrored between Hive and Unity Catalog in real time, ensuring uninterrupted data access, analytics, and zero disruption.
• Low-impact notebook refactoring: Simple catalog-switching logic and contextual parameters enabled backward compatibility, avoiding rewriting of 1,500+ notebooks.
• Enterprise-grade security: Row-level and column-level security enforced data protection, access control, and compliance.
• Automated governance workflows: Migration, testing, and rollback workflows were automated for speed, traceability, and resilience.

All dashboards and analytics ran smoothly throughout the migration, powered by real-time dual sync and validation. Centralized governance via Unity Catalog enabled full auditability, metadata visibility, and compliance. Business units now operate independently within a unified governance model, innovating securely. Engineering velocity accelerated with a 60% reduction in migration time, thanks to reusable templates and minimal code change, enabling quick onboarding of new teams and datasets.

In total, approximately 1,500 production notebooks were migrated and 100% of active Delta tables synced with zero disruption across thousands of reports. All teams now operate on a single, governed analytics platform ensuring full security compliance.