Reasons for rebuilding the reporting database

Current version: 8.2

When you rebuild the reporting database, you reprocess the interactions that have already been aggregated into the reporting database.

The rebuilding process merges historical data from earlier versions of Sitecore with live xDB data making all the data available to Sitecore reporting applications. One of the main reasons for rebuilding the reporting database is as the final step of the conversion process.

Important

To ensure that the reporting database contains the latest data changes, you need to rebuild it from time to time. Remember that when you rebuild the reporting database, you overwrite its contents. For best results, you should use a clean copy of the Sitecore.Analytics.mdf database every time you perform a rebuild.

You should rebuild the reporting database if:

  • You have used the conversion tool to populate the reporting database with analytics data from an earlier version of Sitecore.

  • You have made changes to the collection database – a rebuild is necessary to reflect the changes in reports that use older data. For example, if you have changed the channel associated with one of your referring sites.

  • You have reclassified reporting data – In Experience Analytics and other Sitecore reporting applications it is possible to reclassify data that has already been processed by the aggregation layer. For example, if you have reclassified a search key word or channel, aggregated report data is not automatically updated. This can cause the reporting database to become out of sync with the collection database.

  • Your databases are out of sync – if the reporting database has been lost or has become out of sync with the collection database, for example, due to a disaster or if contacts have been merged. The accuracy of the reporting database can decrease over time as more contacts are merged and more interactions are imported. How often you need to rebuild the reporting database depends on your system architecture and the amount of merges and imports you need to process.

Note

The rebuild process is semi-automated but also requires an administrator to attach, detach, or replace databases in SQL Server, and also to modify some configuration files.

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