I have a question about snapshot. Here is my situation. I'm an intern and want to learn more about our model. We are in the process of getting ready to roll it out to the company. My idea is to create a snapshot of our current model and delete everything but the data and try to reconstruct the model. Before I do so I just want to confirm that in doing this I won't affect the current model at all if I do everything in the snapshot project. Am I correct in thinking this is a safe way to go about my idea and in doing so it wont affect the original model?

Hi Brian

When you create a snapshot you do create a safe environment for you to try and reconstruct the model - if that is what you want to do. So, yes, and good luck with the config!

Regards Niels

Awesome, thank you very much!

Niels is exactly right, snapshot will work perfectly for this situation. 

Another option is to just recreate the whole model, the data and the objects. You would probably learn more doing it this way and expose anything that is hard to see within the data area. We recently did this and we find some things with there were calculations set for unknown reasons that were exposed. Also, part of the modeling is considering what/how to transform your data and apply them to master data sets. 

But a snapshot would work. We do this a lot for "what if" model changes. We then bring the information to our steering committee for approval before we make the model change in production.

Good luck! 

That was sort of my plan. I wanted to delete everything but the raw data. I would scrap everything but I don't have access to loading the data so I'm going to start as close to the beginning as possible. Thank you for the advice.

Great idea!

A great way to learn Brian!  And perfect use of a snapshot.  You will find that you won't be able to "undo" all of those actions in the audit log of a snapshot but you certainly can modify everything without impact on your parent dev project.