The Truck Pulling Up on Moving Day
why data platform migration is a genuinely distinct discipline — moving data and workloads between systems without losing what matters.
Part 1
Part 2
Before Anyone Planned a Move at All
how organizations historically approached platform migrations with far less upfront planning, and the problems that created.
Part 3
Why Anyone Moves House in the First Place
the genuine motivations behind a data platform migration — cost, capability, end-of-life systems — and why the reason should shape the approach.
Part 4
Taking Inventory Before Anything Gets Packed
why a comprehensive assessment of existing data, dependencies, and consumers must happen before any migration planning can proceed responsibly.
Part 5
Deciding What to Keep, Donate, or Toss
why a migration is the ideal moment to clean up unused, redundant, or stale data rather than moving everything by default.
Part 6
Labels on Every Box
why mapping metadata and schema between source and destination systems is essential for anything to arrive usable at the other end.
Part 7
Extra Wrapping for the Fragile Items
why genuinely sensitive or critical data needs deliberately extra care and validation during a migration, beyond standard handling.
Part 8
Moving Room by Room, Not All at Once
the tradeoff between a phased, incremental migration and a single, comprehensive cutover, and how to choose between them.
Part 9
Living in Both Houses for a While
how running old and new systems in parallel validates a migration's correctness before fully committing to the cutover.
Part 10
The Moving Company's Insurance Policy
why a genuine, tested rollback plan is essential before any migration begins, not an afterthought considered only if something goes wrong.
Part 11
Hiring Movers vs. Doing It Yourself
the tradeoff between using dedicated migration tools and vendors versus building custom migration scripts in-house.
Part 12
Telling Everyone the New Address
why updating every downstream application and consumer to point to the new system is a genuinely significant, often underestimated task.
Part 13
Furniture That Doesn't Fit the New House
how schema and format incompatibilities between source and destination systems require deliberate transformation during migration.
Part 14
Moving the Same Furniture vs. Buying New
the strategic choice between rehosting existing systems as-is and re-architecting them to take advantage of the new platform's capabilities.
Part 15
Testing the Utilities Before Moving In
why validating data quality and correctness in the destination system, before fully relying on it, is a genuinely essential final check.
Part 16
The Actual Day of the Move
how careful cutover planning minimizes downtime and disruption during the final, decisive moment of a migration.
Part 17
Boxes Still Unpacked in the Garage
why post-migration technical debt and unfinished cleanup work deserve deliberate, planned attention, not indefinite postponement.
Part 18
When the Move Goes Wrong
the common ways migrations fail, and why most of these failure modes trace back directly to a skipped or rushed earlier planning step.
Part 19
The Housewarming Party
why formally decommissioning the old system and declaring a migration genuinely complete is its own deliberate, necessary milestone.
Part 20
Settled Into the New Home
reassembling every practice covered across this series into the complete picture of what disciplined data platform migration looks like.