How to read a warehouse migration case study before you believe the number

Three case studies, three directions, three good numbers. GetYourGuide moved BI serving from Snowflake to Databricks and reports 20% off. Travelpass moved from Databricks to Snowflake and reports 65% off. SmarterX moved from Snowflake to BigQuery and reports costs cut in half. All three can be true. None of them is your number yet.

We read every case study the same way, with four questions.

Which line item moved

GetYourGuide's 20% is specific: the Looker workload, which they say was 84% of their Snowflake credits. Not storage, not ETL. SmarterX's "half" is overall overhead after retiring other SaaS tools at the same time. Those are different denominators, and the smaller the denominator, the easier the percentage.

What the old estate was doing wrong

Travelpass describes the previous setup as labor-intensive and unstable. GetYourGuide was copying data into a second warehouse just to serve dashboards. A migration that removes a copy or an idle cluster saves money on any platform. Ask how much of the saving was the destination and how much was finally deleting the waste.

Who did the work, and who paid

Snowflake Professional Services ran Travelpass's six-week cutover of 30 TB and 134 pipelines. Google's onboarding team sat inside SmarterX's month-long move. GetYourGuide used two of its own engineers for four and a half months. Vendor labor in a launch story is usually priced at zero. Yours will not be.

What was measured afterward

GetYourGuide published a miss: 72% of queries under ten seconds against a 90% target. That one sentence makes the rest of their numbers more believable, not less. A case study with no target and no miss has not finished measuring.

Run the four questions, then build your own cost baseline before any migration checklist. The headline is the vendor's number. The baseline is yours.