Rewriting Dates in Sitecore Analytics for Demo Data

Hello everyone! It's been awhile since I've blogged so I thought I'd post this useful bit before next week's MVP Summit and Symposium. Two plugs first though!

Core Sampler

If you haven't yet, be sure to check out the new Sitecore podcast from Derek Dysart, Core Sampler. Episode 1 is everyone's favorite Sitecore junkie, Mike Reynolds, and Episode 2 will be someone else very familiar...

#SitecoreSymGives

The Sitecore MVPs are leading an effort to help the Sitecore Community give back to the people of Louisiana, who are so graciously hosting us next week. Many many people not far from New Orleans have experienced horrific flooding recently, and are facing a long recovery.

You can contribute to the effort through a financial donation or by volunteering the day before Symposium.

And with that, let's get on to the post.

Adjusting Dates in your xDB Demo Data

In preparation for demoing Active Commerce at Symposium, we are busy creating JMeter scripts which simulate various user behaviors, conversions, traffic sources, etc. We are really hoping to show the power of the Sitecore marketing and analytics tools for e-commerce sites powered by our product. I won't get into the JMeter scripts here -- that's perhaps a topic for another day. But the result of running these scripts is a huge number of visits, but all on the same day. Not very exemplary of real site traffic. So I set about creating a PowerShell script that allowed us to "rewrite history" and shape the traffic over a given time period.

The script can be found below. It uses a string of integers to represent the traffic shape, and updates the mongodb analytics data in place. You'll obviously need to rebuild your reporting database (and maybe your analytics indexes??) after running this. It is dependent on the Mdbc (MongoDB Cmdlets for PowerShell) Module.

If you are looking to generate dummy or demo data for use with Sitecore Analytics, this may be useful for you. Enjoy!