Hack to the Future: Data Track

Introduction

Cymbal Shops, a thriving online retailer, found itself at a crossroads. Its existing e-commerce platform, while functional, was struggling to keep up with rapid growth and increasing customer demands. Additionally, a recent mandate from the board to implement generative AI capabilities added a new layer of complexity. The company’s CTO recognized the need for a significant transformation to stay competitive and relevant in the fast-paced industry. The CTO has looked to Google Cloud to provide a solution to the organization’s business and technology strategy going forward.

Cymbal Shops chose Google Cloud as its strategic partner for this transformative journey. The company was particularly drawn to Google Cloud’s expertise in Gen AI, its commitment to open source technologies, and its robust suite of managed services.

Challenge Overview

In this gHack we’ll help Cymbal bring this plan forward as much as possible, primarily focusing on the migration of the legacy application MySQL database to Spanner. From that point we’ll create BigQuery analytics datasets to handle both historical and live data using federation, use advanced generative AI to enhance the existing dataset with descriptions and images, and finally implement semantic search on this dataset.

Learning Objectives

During the process we’ll learn about

  • Cloud Spanner and how to migrate from a legacy database
  • BigQuery for analytics workloads on federated data from Spanner
  • Application integration for automating certain tasks
  • GenAI capabilities on BigQuery

Challenges

Prerequisites

  • Basic knowledge of GCP
  • Basic knowledge of Python
  • Basic knowledge of SQL
  • Access to a GCP environment

Contributors

  • Murat Eken
  • Gino Filicetti