[Obsolete] Disable xDB in Sitecore 7.5 with Sitecore Analytics Enabled for Basic Personalization

In our project, we use Sitecore 7.5 and we enabled Sitecore Analytics so that we can do basic personalization in the renderings. In Sitecore 7.5, we do not have CMS-Only mode like Sitecore 8.1. If we do not have xDB database setup, we have seen many repeated Mongo DB errors in the log files. Moreover these repeated logs slows down the authoring and production environment.

We contacted Sitecore to provide a patch to disable the xDB errors and it seems it is not possible in Sitecore 7.5 but to upgrade our Sitecore instance to 8.1.

As a workaround to disable these errors, we went ahead and disabled background services and other related configurations in Sitecore analytics. This has disabled the unnecessary errors related to Mongo DB and analytics but Sitecore basic personalization was still working for our renderings. 

Warning: These configuration changes may affect other functionalities related to Sitecore Analytics. Due to lack of documentation on these steps, I am marking commenting and marking this blog as Obsolete. 

• In \App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Analytics.config, modify the config values.
  

  <setting name="Analytics.LogLevel" value="None" />
  <setting name="Analytics.PerformLookup" value="false" />

• In \App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Analytics.config, comment out these lines.
  

  <!--<hooks>
  	<hook type="Sitecore.Analytics.ConfigLoader, Sitecore.Analytics" />
  	<hook type="Sitecore.Analytics.BackgroundServiceLoader, Sitecore.Analytics" />
  </hooks>
  <sessionEnd>
  	<processor type="Sitecore.Analytics.Pipelines.SessionEnd.RaiseVisitEnd, Sitecore.Analytics"/>
  </sessionEnd>
  <scheduling>
  	<agent type="Sitecore.Analytics.Tasks.EmailReportsTask, Sitecore.Analytics" method="Run" interval="0:00:00">
  		<DatabaseName>master</DatabaseName>
  	</agent>
  </scheduling>-->

• In \App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Analytics.Processing.Aggregation.ProcessingPools.config, comment out these lines.
  

  <!--<pipelines>
  	<initialize>
  		<processor type="Sitecore.Analytics.Automation.Pipelines.Initialize.RegisterDataModelExtensions, 
          								Sitecore.Analytics.Automation.MongoDB" />
  	</initialize>
  </pipelines>-->

• In \App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Analytics.Processing.Aggregation.Services.config, comment out these tags completely.
  
• In \App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Analytics.Processing.Services.config, comment out these tags completely.
  
  
• In \App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Analytics.Tracking.config, comment out these lines.
  
  
• In \App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Analytics.Tracking.Database.config, comment out these lines.