Case Study: Sainsbury’s achieves 72% shorter job times and 25x throughput increase with Snowflake Professional Services

Sainsbury’s Engages With Professional Services to Optimize Snowflake and Create Center of Excellence

Sainsbury’s, the U.K.’s second-largest retailer with 2,200 stores and a large digital presence, set out to unify its multi-brand, multi-channel business and remove data silos by adopting Snowflake on AWS. The team faced real-time ingestion of 30–40 million events per day (with holiday spikes much higher), slow, one-size-fits-all ETL pipelines that took weeks to run, and rising costs and complexity that limited velocity and predictability.

Working with a Snowflake Resident Solutions Architect, Sainsbury’s redesigned and simplified its pipeline using Snowflake Streams and Tasks, added monitoring dashboards, and right-sized warehouses for different workloads. The changes cut average job time by 72% and increased throughput per minute more than 25x, reduced multi-week batch imports to days, delivered substantial cost savings, and helped build an internal Center of Excellence to spread best practices across the business.

Sainsbury’s

Jody Buczynski

Data Engineer