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Episode 741 · Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

SE Radio 741: Sahil Walia on Schema Changes and Data Migrations

7 Oct 2026 · 47 min

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Episode notes

Shail Walia, a senior technical architect at Snowflake, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about schema migration and data migration. Together, they discuss the basics of schema: do all data sets have schema?; what drives schema change?; are data migration and schema migration the same thing? Must they happen at the same time? They then talk about the challenges and failure modes of schema migration, including challenges at scale, migrating without downtime, the concept of "safety" in data migrations, and safety patterns for data migration - double writes, read repair, replication,…

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Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

[email protected] (SE-Radio Team) · Tech & Science · English

Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. SE Radio covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known…

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