Release Notes
These are the release notes for Visitor Data Mart 9.2c, Spring 2012.
Note: To support the Visitor Data Mart 9.2c release, you must upgrade from Analytics 9.2a or 9.2b to Analytics 9.2c; however, there is no functional change between Analytics 9.2c and these prior versions. This upgrade is required only for Visitor Data Mart users.
Additions and Changes
- New engine architecture: The Visitor Data Mart Loader engine (wtedl.exe) has been replaced by two new engines (both called by the existing “WebTrends – Event Database Loader” service):
- Parser (wtParser.exe) – Parses the SDC logs and formats them into files that the Loader consumes.
- Loader (wtLoader.exe) – Consumes the files from the Parser and inserts the data into the Event Database.
- Performance improvements: The new engine architecture improves performance due to:
- Simultaneous parsing and loading – The new Parser and Loader engines run concurrently, enabling faster parsing and loading as the jobs run in parallel.
- 64-bit support -The Loader engine supports 64-bit processing (no longer constrained by 3 GB of RAM).
- Multi-threaded enhancements – Extra processing threads were added to the new Loader engine, which further reduces the overall load time.
- Database index and schema changes – Modifications were made to the Event Database to further reduce database load times.
- Enhanced visitor identification: Visitor Data Mart now includes an optional enhanced visitor identification method combing two of our proven visitor identification approaches, resulting in improved accuracy and counting of unique visitors. Please contact Tech Support to take advantage of this enhancement for existing profiles.
- Improved referrer tracking: Previously, the “First Hit Of Visit” parameter had to be detected in order to set the “Entry Page” and “Referring Domain” values for a visit. With this release, new profiles will have these values set even if the “First Hit Of Visit” parameter is not detected (e.g. – it occurred on a portion of the site not being loaded into this profile). Prior to this change, Entry Page and Referring Domain were marked “Unspecified” if the hit containing the “First Hit Of Visit” parameter was filtered out of the profile. Please note that this change applies to new profiles only, unless you enable the behavior on an existing profile by removing the following setting from the profile’s .wlp configuration file: RequireFirstHitOfVisitParameter = true.
Enhancements and Issues Resolved
- ENG384410, ENG385804, ENG385838: SearchPhrase punctuation: Formerly, all punctuation was removed from the “SearchPhrase” value on the “Search Clickthrough” Event.
- ENG384404, ENG385793: Double-byte character corruptions: Formerly, any double-byte characters that contained new line or non-breaking space values were corrupted.
- ENG372524: Parser accepts cs-uri-stem values up to 512 characters. This is the maximum length supported by shared analytics libraries. This resolves the issue of invalid hit detection with values longer than 260 characters. With the hits containing long cs-uri-stems no longer treated as invalid, the number of page views/events may increase.
- ENG372521: Parser assigns any hit with truncated Visitor or Visitor parameters to the unknown visit/visitor. This resolves the issue of truncation of query fields exceeding 2048 characters; sometimes, the Visit or Visitor sessionization parameters were truncated. This caused invalid Visit or VisitorIDs to be associated with the visit.
- ENG372657: Parser assigns visits with expired start times (more than 1 week past the visit starttime value) to the unknown visit/visitor. When the parser detects a hit that is more than 1 week past the visit start time value, the hit will be assigned to the unknown visit/visitor. The solution is to have a configurable maximum visit length in the eventdb.ini file. One week is the default maximum length for a visit.
- ENG372714: Loader inserts ‘unspecified’ in the ProductID or ProductSku column if one column has a value and the other column does not. Formerly, the loader inserted “unspecified” for all empty dimension values (content group, site, page, etc) except for values in the ProductSku Dimension table.
- ENG36508, ENG368816: Loader recognizes Event Trigger URL matching (URL values for event triggers are no longer ignored). Formerly, any event (standard or custom) would ignore the URL value for the event trigger for events configured to execute on specific URLs (and only affects URL matching, not parameter matching). This could result in reduced event counts for events configured with URL match criteria.
- ENG372833: Loader rounds VisitorLifetimeValue correctly in the Visit table. Rounding logic has been corrected so lifetime values are rounded to two decimal places instead of four as they were in the past.
- ENG372860, ENG360300, ENG371836: Loader uses first visitor ID encountered for each visit. This change addresses the situation in which hits have the same wt.vt_sid value, but belong to different visitors (if there are missing wt.co_f values in a hit, wt.co_d or webtrends_id is used). In these cases, the most recent visitor ID found in the log file was used.
- ENG372799, ENG372831, ENG372832: Customer table is no longer updated if duplicate invoices are encountered. If an invoice already exists in the PurchaseEvent table, a duplicate purchase event is not processed. This prevents page refreshes from causing inflated purchase numbers.
- ENG372850: Loader now accounts for visitor anomalies. The visitor count is no longer distorted due to visitors with multiple simultaneous sessions, or a missing or filtered out First Hit Of Visit parameter.
- ENG373979: Loader incorrectly inserting Japanese characters. The loader would not insert Japanese characters correctly when encountered in the SDC log. The issue stems from the loader not using the proper encoding scheme / code page when doing bulk inserts into the database. The new loader uses the “Profile Language” setting specified in the profile editor to determine which encoding scheme to use to read the data. Japanese data will now be properly inserted and stored in the database.
- ENG371822: Deleted Events and Lookup Tables remain visible in Visitor Data Extract UI. After an event or lookup table was deleted in the Administration UI, it would continue to appear in the drop down list of Objects available within the Visitor Data Extract UI.
- ENG379571: Custom attributes on Visit/Visitor events that contain scientific notation no longer produce errors. Scientific notation is treated the same as other non-numeric data–’NULL’ is imported.
Known Issues
- The Report user interface crashes with IE8 when using Java 1.6 versions 18-21. The workaround is:
1. Download and install the latest JRE http://www.java.com/en/download/inc/windows_upgrade_ie.jsp
2. From the Windows Control Panel, select Java
3. Uncheck “Enable the next-generation Java Plug-in” and click OK.
4. Restart the browser.
5. Log in to Webtrends. - In some new installations that use Webtrends Score, the following error may be encountered when first attempting to create a new Rule Set, “You have reached your licensed limit of 0 rule sets.” If this happens, refresh your license. From Webtrends Administration, navigate to Application Settings / Licensing / Refresh License and click Refresh Now.
- A registry update may be required when you upgrade Webtrends Analytics from version 9.2b to 9.2c. If this error appears when you launch the installer:
“Setup detected that one or more components exists on this computer. Setup will now exit.”
add the following registry key and restart the installer.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\WebTrends Corporation\InstalledApps\WebTrends Reporting Center] "Location"="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Webtrends\\" "Time"="4:27:34" "Date"="4/10/2012" "SourceDir"="C:\\Users\\admin\\Desktop\\Webtrends.9.2.2.465.Setup\\msi\\" "TempFolder"="C:\\Users\\admin\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\" "Version"="9.2.2.465"
- The VDM Lookup table import process does not work correctly when the Extended Attributes Master Database (XMDB) or the Event Database (EDB) uses a named SQL instance along with a specified port.
