jargon

Architecture & practice·Legacy systems and migration

you wrote to both databases for the whole migration, and spent a week chasing the rows where only one write landed.

Dual write

Writing the same data to the old and new stores during a migration so either can serve reads. It is easy to describe and hard to do correctly, because two writes without a shared transaction will eventually diverge, and the divergence is silent. Teams that do it successfully plan for reconciliation from the start — a comparison job, a repair path, and a decision about which store is authoritative at each phase.

Commonly confused with