Alexey Rusakov on Sitecore development

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Sitecore 5.3 beta1 (or beta 060705 to be precise) is live on SDN5 and the word is out. Everyone reading the Sitecore blogs must have seen the really cool, sheer and 2007-ready Content Editor screenshots. True, it is an impressive stuff, but there must be more to new release than just rehauled Content Editor. I’ve been working with production builds lately and haven’t really had a chance to dive into 5.3. So I’m going to change that and blog at the same time.

After downloading your hot copy, there are things you notice before ever having a chance to play with Content Editor:

Running the .exe file gets you to new installation wizard. After providing a valid Sitecore license (old 5.x licenses work fine) you can pick database engine, installation folder and create new IIS site. Basically it does everything needed to get Sitecore instance up and running, asking minimum amount of questions.

Installation wizard

Database selection screen unveils yet another change: new storage engine options. Sitecore 5.3 adds Microsoft SQL Server Express and SQLite support. Both are free file-based storages and last time I saw performance test results, they run faster than Firebird.

Another bit is that SQLite can successfully compete with SQL Express on read operations, which is what serving content is mostly about, while being slower on writes. I’ll check on test results to get back with some more details.

Overall, new installation wizard coupled with fast file-based storage options make deployment a lot easier. I've never used automatic installs previously, but the new one is a nice thing to have.

Storage engine options

To wrap off the post, here are 5.3 recourses available:

SDN5:

Blogs covering 5.3:

Tuesday, July 11, 2006 9:49:20 PM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

Comments [2]
Sitecore | 5.3

Tuesday, July 11, 2006 11:16:26 PM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

Hi Alexey,

SQLite is significant slower then the Express version. For example, the SQLite publisehes it's content in half an hour from the master to live :S.
Terrible slow. Maybe good to develop with(master as webdatabase), but much to slow for production environments.

Have an article on the queue about the installer. It's definitelly better(some of my requests are actually intergrated), but at the moment it's just slow. It takes cpu-usage to 100%, etc.

This sounds a little disappointing, actually I'm not disappointed in 5.3.'Since the start I've been periodically updated by Lars and Jakob, by mail and blog, and have seen lots of improvements. Altough you have to wait if and how the product will be received by the customers. Maybe good news: One of our biggest customers is seriously thinking about building it's intranet, building starts medio september, in 5.3!

That's it for now. Tomorrow I'll shwo 5.3 to salesmen and other engineers at the Office. Can't wait to see their faces ;)

Alex de Groot

Wednesday, July 12, 2006 4:09:27 PM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

Hi Alex,

You're right - SQLite feels a bit slower in Sitecore client, and definitely slower on publishing because publishing involve lots of 'writes'.

I've added a separate post on file based storages to be clear.

Alexey Rusakov

Comments are closed.