In other words, the values of these fields would not be meaningful across builds. Would this be a problem down the line?
I fear yes. Unless you're doing a simple store-and-peek system, if you want to build derived tables that refer to the original data you'll be losing the derived data at each step (or you'd be forced to rebuild that as well).
Of course, this is in addition to the considerations above, in particular the fact that you would interrupt service with the first approach. The whole point of the RDBMS should be that you can work on the data with the least interference on what the other users are doing.
Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<<ti.xittelop@oivalf
Don't fool yourself.
