SDL Tridion (5.3) deleting large publications

By | March 7, 2011

Recently I had the possibility of fixing one of my customers blueprinting structures which was of questionable quality. The change involved phasing out twelve large publications filled with all types of content imaginable. Of course I used the tips&tricks from a previous post on this topic which handled the ‘unpublishing‘ of content. However I quickly ran into problems which were the result of the time needed by the application to delete the publication.

The publications had been in use for over 4 years and a lot of content had been accumulated in them. In order to be able to delete these publications I had to set a number of timeouts to > 600 seconds. The following might prove useful if anybody attempts a similar clean-up:

  1. Tridion configuration -> timeout settings ->Seconds before a time out is generated when executing a long query
  2. MSDTC Admin Tools –> Component Services. Then Right click Computer –> Properties.
  3. IIS “script time out” error in Active Server Pages.

After these changes I was able to delete most publications and in addition serve a lot of coffee to my colleagues. Unfortunately some publications had not yet reconciled with their fate and refused to be deleted throwing all kinds of incomprehensible errors. I found the following solution to this problem:

<content disapproved by Tridion support>

  1. Please back-up your DB before attempting the following.
  2. Run the Stored procedure: EDA_PUBLICATIONS_DELETE using the publication id as parameter.

</content disapproved by Tridion support>

3 thoughts on “SDL Tridion (5.3) deleting large publications

  1. Jeff

    Optimizing the CM DB (statistics and indexes) and truncating the transaction log (if on SQL Server) can boost performance – it’s a good step to take before taking unsupported steps on the DB.

    Reply
  2. Albert Post author

    Hi Jeff,

    Thanks for sharing. The steps you describe are part of the regular maintenance plan for this particular DB.

    Reply
  3. Dominic Cronin

    Hi Albert,

    Yeah – real world Tridion work, I suppose. But….

    …. I’d still like to know the details of the “all kinds of incomprehensible errors”. One thing you can say for Tridion is that its error support is thorough. Maybe you can post the error stack for some of the incomprehensible things.

    Cheers
    Dominic

    Reply

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