Oracle to Databricks migration for banks
The data team had heard this pitch before. Earlier attempts to move the bank’s warehouse off Oracle had failed. When we arrived, the business side expected the next one to fail too.
The bank is a major CEE bank. Its warehouse ran on Oracle, its data lake on Cloudera, and both had grown for about 20 years. The hardware was due for a refresh with a large capital bill. The AI roadmap needed data the warehouse could not feed.
Governance on Databricks: Why Cost Control and AI Transparency Are One Problem
Ask most teams what governance means on a data platform and you will get answers about access and permissions. Ask the same teams a year into running AI workloads and the conversation shifts: what is this costing us, who is running it, and can we explain what it did? At Databricks Bucharest User Group #3, our Lead Data Engineer Vlad Mihalcea and Burak Seyid, Solutions Architect at Databricks, took that second conversation as their starting point, in a session on governance from cost optimization to AI transparency.
Migrating the Biggest EDW in CEE to Databricks: The BCR Story
A bank’s enterprise data warehouse is not a system you swap out over a quiet weekend. Reporting, risk, regulatory work and day-to-day decisions all sit on top of it, and years of logic have accumulated inside it. At Databricks Bucharest User Group #3, Mircea Idriceanu, Head of Data for Group; Data Analytics & AI Division at BCR, and our CTO Alexandru Puiu presented how BCR moved what they describe as the biggest enterprise data warehouse in Central and Eastern Europe onto Databricks.
Presenting the Largest Databricks Bucharest User Group #3 Event: A Full House at The Marmorosch
Date: 06.10.2026, Bucharest, Romania Databricks Bucharest User Group #3: A Full House at The Marmorosch On September 30, more than 110 people filled The Marmorosch Bucharest, Autograph Collection, for the third edition of Databricks Bucharest User Group. As proud co-organizers of the largest Databricks meetup in Bucharest, we wanted to say thank you first: to […]
Building customer matching on Databricks for a luxury brand selling worldwide
A client buys two pieces online in March. In April, she is in a store in another country, asking about an alteration to something she bought the year before. She has shopped with the brand since 2019.
Databricks Bucharest User Group #3: What to Expect from the September 30 Meetup
Databricks Bucharest User Group #3: What to Expect from the September 30 Meetup
Databricks just rebuilt the data stack for AI agents. Here is what Retail and Banking should do about it.
“AI does not have an intelligence problem. It has a context problem.” That was Ali Ghodsi’s framing at the Databricks Data + AI Summit 2026, and it points at something most of the coverage missed.
Databricks as a Compute Layer: Core Concepts, Best Practices, and Why It Outperforms Legacy Systems
Modern data platforms are no longer built around fixed infrastructure and monolithic systems. As data volumes grow and workloads become more diverse, organizations need architectures that are scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient. Databricks addresses these needs by positioning itself not as a traditional database, but as a compute layer on top of cloud storage. What Databricks […]
Databricks x mindit.io on Governance in Action: How Traceability Builds Trust in Data, Analytics, and AI
Trust in data is one of those problems every organization talks about, but few solve at scale. Everyone wants to be “data-driven,” yet decision-making often slows down the moment people start questioning the numbers. Where did this KPI come from? Why does this dashboard say something different than last week? Which dataset is the real […]
Banking on AI – Real-World Success Stories and the Road to Transformation
AI adoption in financial services is no longer experimental – it’s delivering measurable results. Leading institutions across Central and Eastern Europe are proving how agentic AI and data-driven architectures can transform core operations. Leading European Bank: Building a Data Lakehouse for AI Workloads Leading European Bank serving over 15 million clients regionally, faced the challenge […]