A Milestone for Sitecore Intranet Portal

As some of you might know (at least the ones who are subscribing to the "Sitecore Issues and Patches" newsletter), we released the first patch for Sitecore Intranet Portal today.

This patch contains a number of small bug fixes, but more importantly it includes several significant performance improvements. The initial release wasn't really that slow except for a few specific scenarios, but it just didn't fly like the new one does (although there is always room for more optimizations, so expect even better performance in the future).

I've been quite involved in this release, so I look forward to hearing the reactions. Not that it is a huge patch, and we're already preparing yet another patch (and another and another) with improvements, bug fixes and new features.

My thanks go out to everyone in the team who has helped develop, test, coordinate, document and release this patch. And not least to our trusty partners and customers, who have notified us about several issues that we hadn't discovered ourselves yet.

By the way, we have an ambition of making the installation of SIP patches a smoother process in the future. But I'll save that for another blog entry (or maybe simply for the release of the next patch) so that I don't risk promising more than I can hold :o)

Detach multiple databases

As part of my job, I often install new versions of Sitecore for testing, doing demonstrations, making proof-of-concepts, etc., etc. So over time, my SQL Server 2005 Express gets more and more databases attached.

This is not a problem in itself, but sometimes I like to clean things up, so the list of databases doesn't get too overwhelming. But I haven't found any way of detaching multiple databases in one operation. Quite annoying!

But now I found a tool that can do exactly what I need (and much more): Microsoft's SSEUtil.

With this command-line tool, I can simply execute a command like this to detach all databases in a specific folder:
sseutil -m -detach "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\scprinters151\Databases\*"

Or you can use the tool in console mode:
sseutil -m -c
1> !list
1. master
2. tempdb
3. model
4. msdb
5. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\scprinters3012\databases\sc53master.mdf
6. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\scprinters3012\databases\sc53core.mdf
(etc. etc.)

2> !detach "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\scprinters3012\*"
Detached 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\scprinters3012\databases\sc53master.mdf'
Detached 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\scprinters3012\databases\sc53core.mdf'
(etc. etc.)

Quick, easy, flexible. Makes me happy :o)

To read more about the tool, have a look at:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/12/15/433284.aspx


Notice: This article applies to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Might also work with SQL Server 2005.