“Les Mills: Bringing order and visibility through shared models”

Les Mills was looking for a modeling tool that could do more than just diagram Snowflake databases. It went beyond just reverse engineering. They needed a lightweight, collaborative tool that would serve as an all-in-one solution for development, data discovery, governance, and CICD. According to Craig Pyper, “Other tools like Erwin wouldn’t cut it because it required us to compromise on usability and maintenance.”

SqlDBM helped Craig’s Data Platform team onboard data modelers, engineers, analysts, and governance personnel. With the click of a few buttons, the team was able to reverse engineer its Snowflake models and generate PK/FK relationships for a set of hanging tables and lineage for a set of views. Right away, SqlDBM reduced complexity, helping the company understand the relationships between database entities of all types.

Les Mills also established SqlDBM as its go-to documentation, and DevOps tool. The tool helps them achieve their goal of prioritizing data modeling within their development cycle by serving as their shared single-source of truth for all data models. It helps them standardize models, document them, analyze their lineage, and compare their versions. This helps Les Mills gain contextual clarity on their data assets