We have had a few situations where changes to an attribute in an entity have resulted in a brand new field being created instead of the old field being updated. Seems to happen the most when a field is renamed. This has resulted in the old field which has the data being set to inactive and a new field created that has no data. End result is when this gets published through to production the customers complain that their data has been lost and we then need to do an SQL cleanup script to transfer the data from the old to the new field.
It would be ideal if the system could automatically do a bulk update in these situations.
What would also be good is if we could attach an Advanced SQL query to an entity change that has access to both active and inactive attributes. This would give us the ability to do more advanced transformations on fields during a publish. I know we can do an on publish timer event but then you end up with a lot of old events or have to go through and delete them after deploying, also accessing the inactive attributes is a bit harder that way.