How Glaspoort ships database changes with the same rigor as application code by branching every environment from production, spinning up ephemeral per-PR databases, and treating migrations as the single source of truth.
by Hadi Farhat, Gideon Spierings, Ricardo de Vries and Raymon Veldman
Glaspoort builds and operates fiber infrastructure in the Netherlands. Everything revolves around growing the number of fiber connections, and for a long time the data team spent its days building BI reports in support of that goal, while the question behind each report was already outdated by the time the report was finished. The result was a sprawl of one-off reports, and users who had nowhere to take their follow-up questions.
So we broke the dependency. Instead of shipping the next report, we built a custom front-end application in which project managers see directly where the opportunities for their projects lie. What is new sits under the hood: we use Databricks products directly as building blocks in the app. Genie, to chat with the data and spin up quick analyses. AI/BI Dashboards, for insights and self-service analytics. Automated workflows with Agent Bricks, which alert project managers the moment something stands out on their projects and Lakebase, the Databricks OLTP database, for the application's transactional data.
