Sitecore xDB - Extending xConnect To Reduce xDB Growth

Background

As I mentioned in a previous post,  putting a Sitecore environment into Production with xDB enabled means opening up the flood gates for a massive amount of data flowing into the platform as it starts collecting interactions and events for both anonymous and identified contacts.

xDB Storage Smarts

Just because you can store everything in xDB, it doesn't necessary mean that you should store everything. 

xDB is a marketing database. As a rule of thumb, you should only store data in xDB if it's required for:

• Personalization
• Targeting
• Measurement / Analytics

It is important to plan for the data requirements early, and again, only store the data that you really need to!

Remove xDB Analytics Data

In version 9.2 and later, xConnect allows you to delete contacts and all associated data in xDB if you choose to. So, you have the ability to remove the data that isn't useful to you anymore. https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/93/sitecore-experience-platform/en/deleting-contacts-and-interactions-from-the-xdb.html

But, you need to do this by writing code, and so you would need to work with your Sitecore architect and developers to carefully plan this out for your implementation. And again, this is only an option for the newer versions of the platform.

Extend xConnect To Filter xDB Analytics Data

One good option that I have implemented is to prevent analytics data that is not valuable to your business from getting into xDB in the first place. xConnect allows you to extend the XConnectDataAdapterProvider, and this allows you to hook into the sweet spot where the session data is being written to the shard databases for storage.

For my implementation, I extended the data adapter provider and added configuration to only goals and other events that I explicitly specify, to be recorded in my collection database.

I hope that this helps with your implementation!

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Sitecore xDB - How To Fix Right To Be Forgotten Breaking EXM Campaigns

Background

Our email manager faced an Email Experience Manager (EXM) issue where when starting or resuming an email campaign, it will start initializing and then it will go directly to a paused state.

Errors

The logs of our Content Management Server revealed the following errors: 

Cause

After digging in, I discovered that this was caused by contacts in our lists that where missing an Alias identifier. This is a dependency for EXM in the way it pulls in the necessary contact data during dispatch. 

What had happened was that our email manager had used the Anonymize feature in the Experience Profile dashboard that executes the right to be forgotten xConnect API under the covers. This process removes the Alias identifier from the contact record in our key xDB shard database tables. 

Checking the xDB Database

If you have SQL experience, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that the xDB databases are not that complicated to work with it all.

Executing the following SQL query helped me find the contacts that where missing contact identifiers:

If you compare what a normal contact looks like vs an anonymized contact, you can see that the records have been wiped from the key ContactIdentifiers and ContactIdentifiersIndex tables.

This is the SQL statement that I used:

Normal Contact

Anonymized Contact

Another important point to note is that when a contact has been anonymized, a new ConsentInformation facet as added to the contact.

 

The Fix

I simply wrote a SQL statement that would insert new Alias identifier records in the ContactIdentifiers and ContactIdentifiersIndex tables for the contacts in my lists that had been anonymized.

Running this SQL statement fixed the missing dependency that EXM required for its email dispatch, and our email campaigns starting sending again.

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Sitecore xDB - Solr xDB Index Troubleshooting Postman Collection

Background

Over time, I have saved a series of Solr queries that I have found to be extremely useful in understanding, troubleshooting and maintaining xDB Solr indexes.  Some are especially useful when performing an xDB index rebuild.

Getting Started

After downloading the Sitecore xDB.postman_collection.json file, you can install it in your Postman application by clicking the "Import" button located in the top-left corner of the app and selecting the file downloaded on your computer.

After doing this, you will see the Sitecore xDB collection appear in your Postman app:

The core / index name, and Solr url are variables, so the next thing you want to do is set the values for your configuration.

Click on the Sitecore xDB collection, and then the more actions option (3 dots) will appear. Click on Edit, and then navigate to Variables.  

Set the solr_url variable to your Solr instance url, and the xdb_index to match the index you want to work with.  

There are two xConnect Solr cores: the live core (usually xdb) and the rebuild core, which has a _rebuild suffix (like xdb_rebuild). So, you can set this to either value, depending on the core you want to work with.

That's it! You should be ready to test.

Working with the collection

The collection has the following queries available to help with your troubleshooting or maintenance.

xDB Contacts Count

This will return the number of contacts in your index (shown in the numberFound value that is returned). 

When you start an index rebuild, depending on the core you have configured, you will see this number initially be 0, and then gradually start to increase as contacts get added to the core from your shard databases. 

Obviously, this is also useful to see how many total contacts you have in your index over time.

xDB Interactions Count

This returns the number of interactions in your index (shown in numberFound value that is returned). 

xDB Docs Count

This returns the total number of documents in your xDB core. This is a combination of contacts and interactions.

xDB Sync Token

This returns the sync token which is a key component of the Sitecore xConnect / xDB optimistic concurrency model. See more information about it here: https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/12453/xconnect-indexworker-error-tokens-are-incompatible-they-have-different-set-of#answer-12454

xDB Rebuild Status

As described in one of my previous posts, it will return the status of your index, which is especially useful if you are performing an index rebuild.

Default = 0

RebuildRequested = 1

Starting = 2

RebuildingExistingData = 3

RebuildingIncomingChanges = 4

Finishing = 5

Finished = 6

xDB Schema Modifications

When setting up xDB cores for the first time, you are required to make specific schema modifications to both your xDB and xDB rebuild cores using the Solr Schema API. See the Sitecore docs site for more information: https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/90/platform-administration-and-architecture/en/walkthrough--using-solrcloud-for-xconnect-search.html

This post request contains the JSON schema modifications that need to be applied to each core.  The JSON that is used in the Body of this request can be found in the schema.json file located in the \App_Data\solrcommands folder of your xConnect instance.

xDB Delete Interactions

Do not use this in your Production environment! Like the name implies, it will remove interactions from your index. This is useful for local dev environments, if you need to clean things up in your index. This can also we used as an example for working in with your Solr cores via the API.

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