Zero Data Loss Is a Design Problem, Not a Promise
Every migration deck eventually gets to the reassuring line: zero data loss. It sounds definitive, which is probably why teams like saying it. The problem is that saying nothing was lost and proving nothing was lost are two completely different engineering tasks.
I learned this the hard way while leading a large compliance-platform migration where the legacy footprint included 4,066 data fields across 62 core tables and 66 pages of critical records. The migration completed with zero data loss, but the interesting part was not the claim. The interesting part was the design work required to make that claim auditable.
That distinction matters because migrations fail in boring ways. A field maps to the wrong destination. A record loses its parent. A legacy object has no clean equivalent in the new schema. A transformation succeeds technically while changing the meaning of the data. None of those failures necessarily crash the...
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