Agentic Data Migration: A Practitioner’s Guide

The Problem

They plan a two-quarter migration, then discover what the plan didn't cover: the stored procedure nobody understands, the dialect quirk that breaks silently, the validation work that doubles every estimate.

A migration is four jobs: the data structures, the historic data, and the pipelines. The pipelines are where migrations stall, because they carry decades of undocumented decisions.

This guide is the playbook for that job: what AI agents change about it, and the evidence trail that makes it governable.