WE tried to unpublish a page from the CME in Tridion 2013 & it was marked successful. However, the unpublish was not successful because the page is still in the Broker DB. How do we get rid of the page? How do we diagnose issues like this? We looked through the Deployer logs & did not see any error related to that page.
UPDATE
For the record, I followed the steps listed in this kb article. Make sure to hit the appropriate HTTPUpload.aspx page so that the package is picked up. That worked.
With regards to your question about diagnosing this type of error, I would probably go through the following:
When you un-publish the Page, check that the (un)publish package is arriving in the incoming folder on the expected Deployer server correctly.
Check that the database connection string, and other Storage settings in the Deployer's cd_storage_conf.xml file are correct
Double-check that the database that you are querying is definitely the correct one. I've been known in the past to be looking at the wrong Broker database (e.g Staging instead of Live), or in the wrong environment (e.g. UAT instead of Prod) even.
Determine whether the cd_storage_conf.xml file settings could have changed recently. For example, were Pages previously stored in the database, and now they're stored on the file system?
Double-check that the Page you are seeing in the database is definitely the one that you have unpublished. I've been caught out in the past with not checking the Publication Id of an item, and it has actually been published from a child or parent Publication.
Increase the logging level of the Deployer in the logback.xml file, restart the Deployer and check in the logs for anything unusual.
Confirm that the instruction to unpublish the Page is definitely in the (un)publish package that lands in the Deployer's incoming folder. This could be caused, for example, by a Custom Resolver that prevents certain pages from being unpublished. (I've seen Custom Resolvers in the past that prevent the homepage from being un-published).
If none of the above work, you could run a SQL Trace on the Broker database to ensure that a SQL query to remove the offending records is run
Failing that, I'd suggest that you log a case with Tridion Support.
Also, convince yourself the Structure Group the Page is in is marked 'Publishable'. If this is not the case a Publish or Unpublish action will be 'Success' in the Queue, but nothing really happens.
This is one of those annoying issues where the CM and the CD DBs are out of sync for an item. I believe this was addressed sometime in the 2011 SP1 release, but it looks like you're still experiencing it.
There are two ways I've dealt with this:
Submit a support ticket, they'll give you a SQL script to run on your CM DB to force set the page to "unpublished". You can then republish it and all is dandy.
Force set the page to unpublished via the CM DB yourself. Note: this risks voiding the warranty if you mess anything up. I do this in my own sandbox VM all the time, but there is no risk there. Consider yourself warned. Here is how: update the STATE column for your Page's (REFERENCE_ID = page ID) record to 0. Back in 2011 there was another table with this status that needed updating, but I don't see any other "STATE" columns in the DB in 2013.
