April 2009 - Posts
In these days, after Microsoft releases Service Pack 2 for the WSS and MOSS (SharePoint 2007 SP2) I've seen number of issues when people tried to update their environment to SP2. There are no issues when you update clean environment, but for customized application there are few things you should be aware about.
I’ve seen number of the following exceptions like this one
[SPDatabaseGbwSequence] [ERROR] Upgrade object too new (build version = 12.0.0.6341, schema version = 2.0.0.0). Current server (build version = 12.0.0.4518, schema version = 3.0.1.0).
when they installed SP2 and run Configuration Wizard.
This error tells you nothing what relates to the actual problem. You could think that you installed any hotfixes that changed your database schema or content database might be not in right state. I had the same thoughts but this didn't help at all.
The root of the problem lies in other side.
Investigating this issue I found that free SharePoint template from Microsoft cause you such issue, especially GroupBoard one. If you have this template installed - that's the problem, because it interacts with the database schema and doesn't allow SharePoint SP2 to be installed.
Solution:
- Uninstall GroupBoard template
- Install SharePoint SP2
- Install GroupBoard template.
It's a funny thing, that this issue was originally described
in German TechNet article - scroll to the very bottom and you will find that exception and description. But this didn't propagated to the english version (switch to eglish version on the top of the page, and you can't find this error)
Lightning Tools released the Web Part, which allows you to connect to database directly, without using BDC. Having direct access to tables, stored procedures is that functionality with WSS and MOSS Standard didn’t have and a lot client suffered from that, developed their own solutions.
Now LT Data Viewer Web Part provides you all necessary information
The Lightning Tools Data Viewer Web Part can save you time and money as it stops the need for developers to write custom code and allows your end users to easily display and format the data they need to see.
The LTDVWP provides the following benefits:
1. No need for SharePoint Designer. The LTDVWP is configured within the browser.
2. Allows for Integrated Security or provided Username and Password
3. Allows for connection to SQL, Oracle and Access (accdb & mdb) via the configuration of properties. (No need for Connection Strings)
4. Connect directly to Tables/Views and Stored Procedures
5. Supports Aggregate Functions such as Count, Min, Max, and Sum
6. Allows for Conditional Formatting on Cells or Rows
7. Filtering of data
8. Caching of Data
9. Update, Delete, and Insertion of Data
10. Web Part Connections
SharePoint development relies on “12-hive” folder and each who writes code for SharePoint uses that folder intensively. SharePoint uses that folder to store features, log, content types are other stuff.
12 hive folder structure is not private and you can find full description all folders in google, the core folders you should know about are the following:
- \ADMISAPI - The directory contain the web service used used by the SharePoint Central Administration and appears as a virtual directory.
- \BIN - The directory contains all the core binary files, utilities that are used by Windows SharePoint Services. Your command line tools such as STSADM.EXE reside in this folder
- \BIN\LCIDD - A directory will be created for each language will be created that contains language specific binary files.
- \CONFIG - This directory contains a set of configuration, binary and resource files used by SharePoint. Some files are the default values which will be copied to web site instances.
- \DATA - SharePoint uses this directory structure for the indexing services where content will be indexed.
- \HCCab\LCID - This directory has a set of cab files containing manifest and content information used by the SharePoint help sytem
- \HELP - The folder contains a compiled html help file (.chm) used by the configuration wizard.
- \ISAPI - This directory contains all the standard Web Services for SharePoint and some additional DLL’s, resources and configuration files that the web services use. Every web application provisioned in SharePoint will have a virtual directory strong>/_vti/_bin that points to this directory, thus giving each web application it’s own set of web services.
- \ISAPI\HELP - This directory contains all the help files used by SharePoint. The folder also contains LCID sub directories for each language installed thus globalising the help system.
- \LOGS - This is the directory that you will visiting frequently whilst doing development and administration as it contains the log files of what SharePoint did and what errors occurred.
- \RESOURCES - This directory contains the core.resx file used for creating language packs for SharePoint. If you are going to be localising your SharePoint sites with different languages and cultures, this is the folder to do it in.
- \TEMPLATE - This directory structure contains the core web site functionality in SharePoint, that is the features, templates, configurations, resources of a web site. What is important to note about this directory structure is that the Virtual Path Provider hides and masks this directory structure, thus it appears under each web site, list in a completely different structure.
Source
Current "SharePoint Tips and Tricks" series has been moved to its own "SharePoint SandBox" site, to leave the place for others SharePoint posts on this blog
SharePoint functionality is build on the top of SQL Server and has a tight cohesion with SQL Tables. Any user’s actions on the SharePoint site lead to the data entries manipulations across several tables.
Unfortunately, SharePoint implemented in the way to have few large tables rather then several small tables, and it stores a lot of contents in one single table. Such approach has a side-effect in table locks, which might hinder the performance of SharePoint sites if you are not aware about such table-centric design
With this in mind, consider splitting the content of large Collaboration site between different Site Collections. The reason for this that Site Collection is implemented as a huge single table.
Let’s imagine that you have site collection with 200 sub-sites, and some of user’s action force the transaction in SQL Server. Such action will lock Site Collection table, thus all 200 sites will be locked as well. In this case all users can’t interact with the SharePoint and will be waiting when that action competes.
There is no workaround for this, and the only way to track such issue is checking how your SharePoint sites performs – it case number of locks your will see noticeable performance degradation. Monitor SQL locks against SharePoint tables, to find such cases.
Update: consider splitting your site collection to be less then 100Gb-150Gb, otherwise you will have lots of locks in site collection table. The best tools to split site collection and move content across contentDB is "SharePoint Administration Toolkit"
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