That was just one symptom of a larger problem. Ecolab, a global leader in water, hygiene, and infection prevention, monitors food safety, pest control, and water quality for thousands of retail and fast food locations across North America. But the data that powered those services lived in nine separate systems — audits, health inspections, pest IoT telemetry, checklists, chemical usage logs, weather feeds, Yelp reviews, CDC neighborhood data, and the FDA food code itself.

Ecolab set out to change that and built something far more ambitious than a unified dashboard.

Ecolab's Retail Intelligence application is a native Databricks App with Lakebase Postgres as its transactional backbone. All nine data sources flow through Lakeflow and Spark Declarative Pipelines into a governed lakehouse under Unity Catalog, deployed reproducibly via Databricks Asset Bundles.

Because the app runs inside the Databricks security perimeter, Ecolab gets built-in authentication, automatic service principals, and Unity Catalog access controls without standing up separate infrastructure. Everything the end user sees originates from Databricks.