Hey everyone, I'm pretty new to all this. I'm currently a junior analyst and our team is planning to move our core reporting from an old, on-premise database (let's say SQL Server 2012) to Snowflake in the cloud.
The volume isn't *huge*—maybe 50-60 tables, with the biggest one around 20 million rows. My senior colleague suggested I look into migration tools like Fivetran or Stitch, but another said writing manual scripts is a better learning experience and gives more control. I'm torn.
I've been practicing my SQL a lot, so I *could* imagine writing a bunch of scripts to do the extract and load. Something like:
```sql
-- Example of what I'm thinking for a single table
SELECT *
INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/table_backup.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
FROM old_database.source_table;
```
Then I'd have to figure out the Snowflake `COPY INTO` commands, handle data type conversions, and make sure nothing gets lost.
But I also see the appeal of a tool that handles the schema mapping and incremental loads automatically. I'm just worried about cost and whether I'll really understand what's happening under the hood.
For those who have done this before: at this scale, is it worth it for a beginner to go the manual route for the learning, or is that just setting myself up for a painful, error-prone process? How much more time does manual usually take? Any gotchas I should watch for?