7-Eleven, Inc. Operates more than 85,000 stores worldwide, serving millions of customers every day. Behind that scale is an equally massive data platform, powering mobile checkout, loyalty programs, on-demand delivery, and AI-powered personalization.
By 2023, that platform was showing stress. As the platform expanded, legacy architectural patterns, including external Hive metastores and workspace-level governance models, began to limit visibility and maintainability. Metadata became fragmented across different environments, making discovery of data more difficult and reducing trust. Compliance teams lacked a unified, account-level view of data access, while technical debt accumulated as thousands of jobs relied on hard-coded paths, RDDs, and DBFS mount points. Additionally, data sprawl across storage locations and legacy workspaces slowed modernization efforts.
The Enterprise Data Platform (EDP) team at 7-Eleven knew that migrating to Unity Catalog would centralize access controls, simplify compliance, and enable federated data architecture. In this blog, we’ll learn why we migrated to the Unity Catalog, how UCX and System Tables helped us orchestrate the migration, and the benefits we’re seeing now that we’ve standardized on UC.
You can learn more about 7-Eleven’s migration to the Unity Catalog by checking out their session Data+AI Summit in 2025.
Building a future-proof data governance strategy
For 7-Eleven, the Unity Catalog was not just about addressing governance shortcomings; It was about building a foundation for the future. Centralized access control, audit logging, genealogy and data discovery will simplify operations and improve trust in the data. A federated architecture will allow business domains to innovate independently while remaining compliant with enterprise standards. Unity Catalog also promises to standardize business metrics through the semantic layer, ensuring consistent KPIs across analytics and reporting.
However, 7-Eleven faced brownfield migration. Years of established code patterns, thousands of tables and notebooks, and jobs built around the external Hive metastore meant that a simple lift-and-shift was not possible. The team needed a structured way to assess their assets, resolve technical debt, and perform the migration without disrupting daily operations.
Steps for seamless migration with UCX and system tables
It’s 7-11 ucxDatabricks Labs’ open source migration assistant to replace manual effort with structured workflows. UCX crawled their assets, provided a comprehensive list of tables, jobs, and permissions, and marked blockers with a “readiness score.” This visibility helped the team focus on what was most important.
With system tables and lineage insights, the EDP team prioritized high-value workflows while de-scoping ~40% of inactive or low-value legacy jobs. This “business-value-first” approach kept the migration manageable and aligned with stakeholder priorities.
Key steps include:
- Identity Federation: Moving from workspace-local to account-level groups, with UCX automatic permission mapping, even in nested hierarchies.
- Medallion Architecture Redesign: Re-mapping storage into layers of bronze, silver and gold during migration.
- Incremental migration with sync and reverse-sync: Allowing Hive and Unity catalogs to co-exist during transition, minimizing downtime and risk.
This phased playbook of assessment, planning, transfer, verification and decommissioning reoriented the project from a difficult challenge to a structured transition.
Stronger governance, faster innovation with Databricks Unity Catalog
With Unity Catalog, 7-Eleven has dramatically simplified governance and opened up new business capabilities. By eliminating over 40% of redundant workflows, the team rationalized its data estate and reduced operational overhead. Governance is now unified, including centralized audit logging, enhanced security, and lineage tracking across all data and AI assets. The platform team manages one set of policies instead of several, improving both efficiency and security.
But the benefits go far beyond simplification. With a central catalog, users across business units can now discover and trust data assets, see how they connect through lineage, and reuse them with confidence instead of re-creating reports. Built-in auditability ensures the team can answer questions “Who asked what?” A significant win for compliance in minutes, not days.
Cooperation has also increased. Data scientists, analysts, and engineers now work from a single governed platform, and share data seamlessly across all domains. This consistency reduces errors, increases productivity, and frees teams to focus on business results rather than administrative overhead.
In addition to these governance improvements, Unity Catalog unlocks new capabilities that foster business innovation:
- delta sharing And databricks clean rooms Power marketing optimization and secure data monetization.
- serverless cluster Eliminate manual cluster management.
- With self-service analytics AI/BI Genie Space and federated domains Give business teams direct access to the information they need.
Lessons from 7-Eleven’s UC migration
7-Eleven’s UC migration is more than a technology upgrade. It is the cornerstone of their digital transformation: simplifying governance, enabling federation across business units, and supporting innovation at scale.
Migrating to the Unity Catalog was not a lift-and-shift project – it was a strategic reset. With UCX and system tables, we gained visibility, phased our migration, and reduced technical debt. Today, all our data and AI assets live under one unified governance model, giving us the confidence and agility to scale AI to 7-Eleven. – Ganesh Susarla, Director, Architecture and Governance, 7-Eleven
As part of this journey, the Enterprise Data Platform team revealed several best practices that can guide other enterprises dealing with complex migrations:
- Invest in a thorough assessment beforehand: Using UCX and system tables technical debt was quickly exposed and low value assets were identified to reduce scope, thereby reducing the overall migration footprint.
- Migrate identities and permissions first: Establishing account-level governance early on created a clean foundation that simplified each downstream step.
- Use migration as an opportunity to modernize: The team adopted the Medallion architecture to reduce sprawl, standardize patterns, and eliminate long-standing technical debt.
- Phase the work to minimize disruption: Sync and reverse-sync allowed Hive and Unity catalogs to co-exist during the transition, ensuring that day-to-day operations continued uninterrupted.
