Personalizing components with Analytics disabled in Sitecore 7.2

Question

I've just come across an issue with missing personalization options on a Sitecore 7.2 website.

Analytics was recently disabled. I found an article explaining that disabling Analytics hides all personalization rules sections.

Is there a way to personalize components with Analytics disabled?

Answer 1

Yes need to have Analytics enabled for the personalization rules to be enabled in the system, but you can effectively disable it by turning off the database writes.

You need to set Analytics.Enabled to true and Analytics.DisableDatabase to true. Example patch file:

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
    <sitecore>
        <settings>

            <setting name="Analytics.DisableDatabase">
                <patch:attribute name="value">true</patch:attribute>
            </setting>
            <setting name="Analytics.Enabled" value="true">
                <patch:attribute name="value">true</patch:attribute>
            </setting>

        <settings>
    </sitecore>
</configuration>

With these settings, you enable the personalization rules in the presentation component, but you do not need the analytics database and no writes are attempted by Sitecore.

Answer 2

My understanding is disabling the DB vs. the config will get you what you need.

From here: https://community.sitecore.net/developers/f/9/t/246

The advantage to disabling the database, means that you can set Analytics.Enabled = true and still use the personalization rules engine for your presentation components. If you don't want/need to use those, then yes, disabling the config might be best.