Case Study Deskcasestudydesk.com
PharmaceuticalsSourced

Case Study: AstraZeneca migrates ~800 Informatica workflows to dbt Cloud 4x cheaper with Datafold

AstraZeneca Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk
Key facts · TL;DR
Company
AstraZeneca
Industry
Pharmaceuticals
Challenge
~800 Informatica workflows to migrate before vendor support ended
Headline result
AstraZeneca's Canada team migrated roughly 800 Informatica PowerCenter workflows to dbt Cloud in 7 months at a 4x lower cost using Datafold's migration platform.

Key results

4x
Migration cost reduction
5+ mo
Time saved vs. estimate
7 mo
Delivery time vs. 12+ estimated
~800
Workflows migrated

The challenge

AstraZeneca's Canada team needed to migrate roughly 800 Informatica PowerCenter workflows to dbt Cloud and Airflow before PowerCenter 10.5 vendor support ended in March 2026. Over 80% of the workflows contained complex incremental behavior, custom scripts, data-quality gates, and ETL metadata logging. Another vendor scoped the project at about 12 months and roughly $1M.

The solution

AstraZeneca used Datafold's migration platform, applying the Data Knowledge Graph for lineage mapping, the Data Migration Agent for automated code conversion, and Data Diff for value-level validation at each step of the conversion to dbt Cloud and Airflow.

By leveraging an AI-driven conversion process to perform the bulk transformation and testing of our existing Informatica codebase into dbt, Datafold rapidly and reliably completed this potentially lengthy task.

CB
Chad Barrett
Senior Manager, Information Management, AstraZeneca

The results, in context

The migration was delivered in 7 months rather than the 12-plus months estimated, saving more than 5 months, and at roughly a quarter of the previously scoped cost. Around 800 workflows were migrated with zero service disruption maintained throughout.

Products used

Datafold Datafold Migration AgentDatafold Data DiffDatafold Data Knowledge Graph