Help with Remodeling InfoCube and DSO

Hi Team,

Here is my situation:

I have a project to add a new Pricing Date field into a Staging DSO and a next level InfoCube. The pricing date field is already configured in the billing extract, but has not been mapped to anything further upstream. The user also needs history from the beginning of the year only.

My overall plan of attack is to:

1. Write an ABAP on R3 to collect up the Document/Line/Pricing Date Information into a Table and port this over to BW somehow.

2. Remodel the DSO to add the pricing field and populate new field with User Exit fetching the Pricing Date.

3. Remodel the InfoCube to add the pricing field and populate new field with User Exit fecthing the Pricing Date.

4. I am nervouse about remodeling a DSO with so many records.

DSO Issue: The documentation for Remodeling a DSO mentions having to delete entire change log.

Question 1. What are the ramifications of deleting the entire change log since any deltas coming out of the DSO depend on this?

Question 2. Should I only have to make sure any upstream deltas are collected before deleting the DSO Change Log?

InfoCube Issue: The documentation for Remodeling an InfoCube metions having to compress infocube first.

Question 3. In InfoCube remodeling is it only required to compress if adding a Key Figure or is it required for any kind of change?
(The Documentation context for this is not very clear. I am not adding a Key Figure, but a date field/characterstic)

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73/helpdata/en/4a/40c3a397ea1d0fe10000000a42189c/frameset.htm

If you need to perform a key figure operation (Add, Replace or Delete) and the InfoCube contains compressed and uncompressed requests, you need to compress all of the requests before you can proceed. Remodeling cannot be performed on a partially compressed InfoCube

Backup Issue: Older documentation for remodeling mentioned backing up the InfoProviders, but gave no context in how this should be approached. The newer documentation does not mention backup probably due to the improved process using shadow tables etc

Question 4. Should I have to backup by creating duplicate providers or have basis backup prior to the remodeling?

Thanks for any help with this challenge!