Refresh from Project Transfer export?

[Paolo F Cantoni]

We perform a LOT Of surgery in the SQL Server DB directly.  We create snapshots using Project Transfer to .EAP files - in case we need to recover from some failure.  We have successfully recovered from failures on many occasions.

As part of our mitigation strategy, we transfer the .EAP file to another SQL Server Clone - to ensure that the exported project is viable.  It takes about 5 or so minutes to create a 0.5Gb EAP file form our repository and about 2 hours to upload it back to SQL Server.

For various reasons, there's been a lot of churn in the repository of late.  It is possible, that there are corruptions in the DB that aren't being picked up by the Integrity Checker.  So it occurred to us that we should refresh the REAL repository (say over a weekend) in the same way we refresh the clone.

This should create a consistent repository with the various internal surrogate keys reset and no "holes".  Understanding that the actual values of the surrogate keys is not meaningful and that "holes" aren't an issue for the DBMS, the "cleaned up" keys are a by-product of the refresh.  The real reason is to re-import a clean model from the export.

Can anybody think of any reasons why we shouldn't do this?  Anything to watch out for?

TIA,
Paolo

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Well, nobody pointed out that the refresh WON'T reset the IDs.

You have to do that separately -m which can be done without the refresh.

Paolo