Cross-Store Migrations — Changing Databases Entirely
Same-store migrations reshape a schema; cross-store migrations change the ground itself — relational to document, single-node to distributed, self-hosted to managed, one vendor to another. Every pattern from this series still applies, but the safety nets of a single database — transactions spanning old and new, one replication stream, one consistency model — are gone, and their replacements have to be built. The backbone of those replacements is change data capture: stop writing to two places, start following one.
CDC replaces dual-writes: tail the source log, snapshot-then-stream to convergence while writes never stop. The transform is the risk concentrate; verification compares intended equivalence; cutover gates on lag with a rehearsed seconds-long pause; rollback is a pre-built reverse pipeline. The killer is stalling, not breaking.