In this session, we’ll walk through why we decided to abandon Redshift, driven by the need for elasticity, cost efficiency, and faster iteration. We'll also discuss how we designed a structured migration blueprint, including a vendor evaluation, proof of concept, and a four-pillared framework to guide our journey.

We’ll then dive into the areas where things got turbulent: why off-the-shelf translation tools failed, why LLMs didn’t help, and the specific technical challenges we encountered. From surrogate key issues to Stitch's unflattened data and Snowplow’s monolithic event tables.

We’ll explain how we kept the migration on track by turning our analysts into co-navigators, embedding them into validation loops to leverage domain knowledge, and how a parallel ingestion strategy helped stabilize progress during high-risk phases.

Finally, we’ll share what this migration unlocked for us: faster ingestion, better permission management and more. Expect real-world pitfalls, lessons learned, and actionable insights for your own migration journey.