membership profile properties

Question

Hello, I have a bunch of site's that use the .net membership profile.

Some of the sites have 1000+ users with profiles.

Is it safe to add new profile elements?

Like if I want to add: twitter account as a profile element. Will this have any conflicts with existing profiles?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms164644.aspx

from my web.config:

 <profile enabled="true" defaultProvider="QuickStartProfileSqlProvider">
  <providers>
    <add name="QuickStartProfileSqlProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" connectionStringName="SimpleTickConnection" applicationName="TheaterSales" />
  </providers>

Answer 1

Do it in one of your staging environments, and roll back if it Fs up-- always an answer

Answer 2

In most cases, it should be safe to add new properties to a profile, although it highly depends on the profile provider you use and how it stores the properties. In the case of the SqlProfileProvider, you're safe because of the way the database is structured; other providers maybe not -- you have to look at how the data is stored and how the provider uses it before you can answer that question.