I think we should make this searching against new columns a configurable option. You know how in the application-context.xml we configure allowOverrideId=true and allowOverrideDate=false for each feeds that are using JdbcFeedSource class? We should do the same and configure CloudFeedsFeedSource with enableFastCategorySearch flag (you can name the flag something else, I'm really bad with names). When we first deploy cloudfeeds-atomhopper, we set this flag enableFastCategorySearch=false in puppet. The following week's deployment, we can change just puppet to set the flag enableFastCategorySearch=true and we start querying against new columns.