Eureka!

A blog about my personal discoveries with Sitecore, .NET, DevOps and more.

How to recover a corrupted Sitecore Web database without having access to the SQL Server

Last Friday night one of my clients’ websites went down. Yes, on a Friday night. Why do websites go down usually outside normal business hours? I don’t know why. A Murphy’s Law would definitely explain it saying that “whatever can go down, will go down on a Friday night“.

In case you have to deal with the same issue in the future, I want to share with you my experience and the steps that I followed to recover a corrupted Sitecore web database in the particular circumstances of not having direct access to the SQL server where the corrupted database was managed.

How I fixed the Sitemap XML module to exclude pages with restricted access in a scaled Sitecore website

Few weeks ago I was working on a sitemap implementation for a website still using Sitecore 8.2 and I decided to use one of the available modules on the Sitecore Marketplace. I chose the Sitemap XML module because I was already familiar with the tool and I had already verified that it was compatible with this version of Sitecore.

An important requirement, that I was looking for, was the ability to exclude all pages not accessible by anonymous users from the content of the generated sitemap file. It doesn’t make sense to have a search engine to crawl restricted pages of a website, if the content of the actual pages is secured and accessible only by authenticated users with specific roles. The search engine would just crawl the login page or a “no access” page where the web application would redirect the crawling bot to.