Advanced Database Crawler / Sitecore Search Contrib Update

This is a post about a maintenance update to the SitecoreSearchContrib project, which is hosted on GitHub now.

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Sync up Sitecore Search Index Update and HTML cache clear

So you have a presentation control (let’s say a sublayout) that relies on Sitecore.Search APIs to get the data to render (news articles for example). Second ingredient in this recipe is HTML cache that you have enabled for this control. The third ingredient is a dedicated Content Delivery server.

You’ve got yourself a race condition between IndexingProvider and HTML Cache!

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Old Search is deprecated in Sitecore 6.5

I’ve blogged about this before, now it’s official. If you have not seen this before, you can find the following in the Release Notes for 6.5:
The Sitecore.Data.Indexing namespace has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version of the CMS in favor of the more powerful and flexible Sitecore.Search classes and corresponding index definitions.

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Search Index Troubleshooting

I have a rule of thumb. If I am being asked the same question twice a week, I am writing a blog post.
Today I have been asked the same question twice, so here you go.
I’ve blogged about search a lot, but one important thing still needs to be covered. Once you are convinced that going with the “new” search is the right way to go, you may have to deal with its configuration. On a two or more server environment, without proper configuration, the search index may not be rebuilt after publishing.

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8 Reasons to Use New Search in Sitecore

Greetings,

Back in 2010 at the first Dreamcore conference, I was honored to present on two topics: ”Data Retrieval Techniques with Sitecore” and “Using Lucene.NET with Sitecore”.

If you have not seen any of those, download the slides and check them out. I consider myself being a data guy, so that’s why I really enjoyed presenting on these topics. Not sure why, but I love everything about data access, and absolutely adore what Microsoft did with Entity Framework 4, especially the oData stuff. There is something truly exciting in seeing your data flow and materialize in one shape or another.

Anyways, back to the topic. During my presentation on Lucene/Sitecore marriage, I was showing that Sitecore actually has two (!!!) implementation of Lucene.NET. One is a legacy, what we call “old” search. Everything within Sitecore.Data.Indexing namespace is considered to be “old” search. It is configured and implemented differently, though it uses the same Lucene.NET dll. There is also the “new” search which is represented by a few classes within Sitecore.Search namespace.

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Sitecore Searcher and Advanced Database Crawler

Hi there,
Today I am proud to announce a preview release of a component that extends the standard Sitecore Searching mechanisms, specifically, the relatively “new” Sitecore.Search namespace introduced in 6.0 and provides easy search querying APIs. If you are not sure what I am talking about, check out this recently published document on SDN and also Ivan’s blog posts about it.

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Friday case: Sitecore is not starting up

Just had to deal with a pretty mysterious issue when my Sitecore app stopped staring up for whatever reasons.
Symptoms:
- nothing happens, browser just hangs with the “Connecting…” message
- nothing in the Sitecore logs
- nothing in the Event Viewer
- nothing unusual on the SQL side
- nothing unusually heavy on the worker process – CPU is idling out, memory is fine.

In overall, a sign that something is inherently wrong.

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How to completely disable Lucene index

Why? As Alexey was blogging some time ago, for the dev machines and even production content delivery environments, it may make a lot of sense to disable the out-of-the-box search engine that Sitecore ships with. This may improve performance and reduce number of folders in Sitecore installation as you will be able to simply remove the whole "indexes" folder.

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