When doing repairs with DSE, understanding the nature of the information in the database provides a significant advantage in choosing an appropriate and efficient repair design.

For example, if you know that certain data is purged weekly, and you find damage in some of this type of data that is already five or six days old, you may be able to discard rather than repair it. Similarly, you might find damage to a small cross-index global and have a program that can quickly rebuild it.

When you know what the data "looks" like, you are in a much better position to recognize anomalies and clues in both keys and data. For example, if you understand the format of a particular type of node, you might recognize a case where two pieces of data have been combined into a single GDS record.