Migrating from WhereScape to Coalesce
Members of the Continuum team have been delivering WhereScape solutions for over 20 years, and many of the data warehouses we helped build remain in production today. This longevity reflects the strength of metadata driven data warehouse development, which is robust, maintainable and provable because the design and business logic are held in metadata rather than embedded in code.
As the data landscape has evolved, the original WhereScape team went on to create Coalesce, a modern reimagining of metadata driven development optimised for modern enterprise data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks and Fabric.
Many organisations are already modernising their data estates as they adopt new cloud platforms, introduce new source systems or seek greater flexibility. If you’re already considering significant changes to your data architecture, a move from WhereScape to Coalesce may be worth exploring.
Why are organisations looking at Coalesce?
For businesses already moving towards cloud data platforms, Coalesce is a great option as it can consume your WhereScape metadata and rapidly recreate existing assets within Coalesce. Coalesce incorporates AI capabilities and MCP integrations that can significantly accelerate the development lifecycle, yet still has all of the robust maintenance and upgrading options that WhereScape brought.
This is particularly useful for organisations using technologies such as Databricks, Snowflake or Microsoft Fabric, where data storage, processing and transformation are increasingly taking place in the cloud. And because Coalesce is serverless, there is no installation on your database servers. It sits above them and can actually manage multiple different platforms.
We have seen this first hand through our work with Coalesce across both Microsoft Fabric and Databricks environments. Check out our webinar with Coalesce working in a Databricks environment here.
Our work with Microsoft Fabric included a live end to end demonstration at Big Data London 2025, showing how Alteryx, Fabric and Coalesce can work together to automate the movement and transformation of data. Read more about this here.
The real value is not simply integration. It is allowing each platform to focus on what it does best, creating a more flexible and scalable data architecture.
Migrating from WhereScape to Coalesce
For organisations that have invested heavily in WhereScape, moving to a modern cloud native architecture can look like a significant undertaking. Existing warehouses contain years of development, business logic and dependencies, and simply starting again is rarely an attractive option.
However, emerging AI assisted migration techniques are helping organisations accelerate and simplify the migration process. Coalesce engineers have demonstrated AI assisted techniques for analysing WhereScape metadata and accelerating migration to Coalesce. In the demonstrated migration, AI was used to analyse warehouse structures and recreate components such as staging layers, Data Vault models, dimensions, facts and scheduling logic.
There are several important advantages to this approach:
Existing business logic may be reusable during migration, potentially reducing redevelopment effort, as custom SQL developed within WhereScape may not need to be written from scratch.
This approach makes significant use of metadata as part of the migration process, meaning it does not necessarily depend on having a fully operational WhereScape environment available throughout the migration.
An attractive solution
For organisations building or modernising around cloud data platforms, Coalesce can be particularly attractive. Its cloud-native architecture, visual development environment and focus on modern data modelling can make it easier to build and scale transformation pipelines within platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks and Microsoft Fabric.
And for organisations already using WhereScape, AI-driven migration approaches mean that moving to Coalesce does not necessarily mean starting again from scratch.
At Continuum, we help organisations assess their existing data environments, design modern data architectures and bring technologies such as Alteryx, Coalesce, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric and Orchestra together into a joined-up solution.
If your data estate has grown organically over time, or you are considering how to modernise an existing WhereScape environment, we can help you get started.
Interested? Get in touch below…