Cutover Sunday: rehearsing the first warehouse load

18 April 2026

Production cutovers fail when the first successful load is also the first attempt. We schedule a rehearsal that uses production-like volumes and the real scheduler, then discard or quarantine the rehearsal output.

Rehearsal checklist

• Confirm source extracts for the rehearsal window are complete and retained
• Run staging validation with production thresholds
• Load into a shadow schema or dated partition, not the live reporting tables
• Compare row counts and key checksums against the incumbent pipeline
• Practice the restart steps written in the runbook — including the “abort and leave incumbent running” path

Who should be in the room

The engineer who will own nights after go-live, someone who can approve a rollback, and the RiverBase consultant for flagship engagements. Finance stakeholders do not need to attend the rehearsal; they need the comparison report the next morning.

Timing in Australia

Many of our Melbourne clients prefer Sunday evening cutovers so Monday reports reflect the new path. Build that preference into the quote; weekend presence is a cost and a calendar constraint, not an afterthought.

See Engagement stages for where rehearsal sits in a full engagement.