The Deal That Almost Died Over a Single Database Migration

A migration begun eighteen months earlier had never been finished. Two tables held overlapping customer records, reconciled by a nightly job nobody had reviewed since the engineer who wrote it left.

Why it mattered to the buyer

• Reported customer counts could not be independently reproduced
• The reconciliation job was a single undocumented failure point
• Any future data work inherited the ambiguity

The remediation was six engineering weeks. The negotiation cost, before it was scoped, was an order of magnitude larger. The deal closed once the work was defined and priced.