Roxanne Ricci and Adrien Chaussende, both data engineers at Back Market, published this on the Google Cloud blog on 5 December 2025. Read it as a vendor page with their byline.
Back Market’s marketplace was on AWS. Snowflake and Databricks were in that stack. Teams already treated BigQuery as the place they read from. The engineers say they had recently moved all the data there, and that the other copies were expensive pipelines with no extra value.
This project is the retirement, plus a move of the wider tech stack onto Google Cloud. It is not the story of a first Snowflake unload.
The Snowflake → BigQuery playbook assumes you still have to land tables, views, and grants. Back Market’s write-up starts after the rows were already in BigQuery.
A two-week clone, then six months
They stood up a proof of concept in two weeks, with Google staff next to their own infra, database, data, security, and backend people. The goal was a clone of pre-production, running only on Google Cloud. They say they hit it. They picked some regions because those data centers run on renewable energy. That sits next to the B Corp reason they give for liking Google Cloud’s carbon reporting.
Production kept running on Databricks. The same data was written to clone tables in BigQuery. They compared the imports. When the outputs matched, they turned the old pipelines off.
Business users kept the same BigQuery screen, so the cutover did not change how they queried. The critical pieces were only on Google Cloud after six months.
The 90% is the CDC path
The pipeline they describe in detail is change data capture. It left AWS Database Migration Service for Google Cloud Datastream.
Datastream writes a lot of small files. Merging those into BigQuery one by one got expensive, so they batch the files once an hour, then load. The path they print is AlloyDB, through a proxy, into Datastream, then Cloud Storage. Cloud Composer runs the hourly transform on Kubernetes pods. BigQuery is the last stop.
They say Datastream alone lowered CDC costs by 90%. That is this pipeline, not a Snowflake contract.
Two other claims sit on the same page and point at different things. The headline says the move to Google Data Cloud halves data costs. The body says the integrated stack “cut our data processing speeds in half.” I would not collapse those into one “twice as fast and half the price” line. Quote the sentence you mean.
BigQuery now holds sales, pricing, ecommerce, orders, delivery, supply chain, and product data, plus marketing-channel data for campaign reports. They also track IT carbon there. Fewer boxes, they say, meant fewer incidents and faster onboarding. No incident count is attached.
If your warehouse move still includes the first copy, rehearse the unload. Their double-run only helps once a second writer is filling clone tables you can diff. The playbook is that earlier job. Use this post for what they did after the copy existed, and for the habit of naming which 90% you mean.