Catalog versioning in Sitecore Commerce Engine

Since the release of Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.0 Update-2 entity versioning is enabled by default for all catalog-related commerce entities: Catalogs, Categories and SellableItems. While certainly being a desirable feature, versioning can have a negative effect in certain use cases. Here are a couple of examples:

One of the clients decided to use the BizFx business tools as a Product Information Management system. While one can argue on effectiveness of such decision, the real pain came up after the 9.0.2 upgrade when a quick 2-step process of updating the product description suddenly became an unintuitive and clumsy struggle through a dozen of steps. The client absolutely hated that experience and did not really care about versioning.

Another client was using an external PIM that we were integrating with by synchronizing the deltas with SXC Catalog system. In 9.0.2 that resulted in creating a new version for every entity update. Not only these versions were useless (since PIM has its own versioning), but it also led to an absolutely unnecessary inflation of the commerce databases. Once again, the client's IT department was questioning efficiency of such design.

Apparently, it is very easy to turn off the commerce entities versioning partially or even completely in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9. All you have to do is modify the Plugin.Versioning.PolicySet policy set by updating or completely removing applicable entity types or allowed actions:

And don't forget to bootstrap!

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