Renaming sidebar id in database?

I am working on a WPMU install with 500+ sites using a custom theme.

Recently after upgrade of WPMU 2.7 to wordpress 3.1, we encountered a strange problem.

when going to sitename.com/wp-admin/widgets.php all widget areas show no widgets in there, but it shows up on the site just fine, now if we add a widget, all other widgets which were showing up on the site go away and only the new one is shown — which itself vanishes if we reopen/refresh sitename.com/wp-admin/widgets.php

The sidebar was registered using (for example):-

register_sidebar(array(
                         'id' => 1,
                         'name' => "Homepage",
                         'before_widget' => '<td><div class=\'something %2$s\'><div class=\'somethinginside\'>',
                         'after_widget' => '</div></div></td>',
                         'before_title' => '<h3 class=\'generic\'>',
                         'after_title' => '</h3>',
                         ));

This was fixed by changing this to :-

register_sidebar(array(
                         'id' => 'something-1',
                         'name' => "Homepage",
                         'before_widget' => '<td><div class=\'something %2$s\'><div class=\'somethinginside\'>',
                         'after_widget' => '</div></div></td>',
                         'before_title' => '<h3 class=\'generic\'>',
                         'after_title' => '</h3>',
                         ));

But in doing so, all widget selections got reset and we have to re-create all customizations by hand again — which is a LOT of work for 500+ sites…

Since all of this is being done on a dev enviornment, so nothing is actually lost…

My question is this : How do i rename sidebar name directly in the mysql database, so earlier customizations can be updated to the new naming convention via a script which we can run during the upgrade process.

Is there any good documentation explaining the options table and how sidebar and widget stuff is stored?

Thanks in advance.