TFS Legacy Collection Datbase Growing Very Large

Question

We migraded to TFS 2010 December 2010 and I've noticed the TFS Legacy Collection database is growing very large.  I'm not a TFS guru so I have to ask, is this growth normal?  We are currently at 72 GB on the SQL Side and when we migrated we started at 6.2 GB in the .mdf.  If its not normal, is there some type of archiving that should be happening to properly support the size?

Answer 1

Hi CarolynVCI, 

Thanks for your post.

You migrated from where to TFS 2010?

What’s size of the initial DB or data which you migrated to TFS 2010, 6.2 GB?

How did you check the Collection database size in your SQL Server?

If you have any further research of this issue, please share your experience here.  

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John Qiao [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 2

Hi John,

We migrated from TFS2008 to TFS2010, December, 2010.  The initial size of the TFS2008 database was 6.2 GB.  I'm a SQL Server DBA, and its on a fairly large machine but on a drive where space is becoming an issue, which caught my eye.  When I run storage forecasting, I take the current stats from the migration forward and its growing consistently.  I spoke with a couple of people who administrate TFS and they explained that we are keeping a history of all testing and the results in the database along with code.  But, here is my dilema, I have sizable sharepoint databases which I was under the impression is also housing code and that database is about the same size.  I have a meeting with the SharePoint admin to discuss what exactly is being housed and to find out if we are duplicating our efforts. 

I just wanted to talk to someone out on the forums that really understands what gets stored in this particular database.  I also wanted to ensure we are running everything efficiently. 

Answer 3

Hi CarolynVCI, 

Thanks for your reply.

According your description, TFS databases growing because the TFS users are keeping the history for ally testing and result with code. So the growing is normal.

If you occurred the drive disk space issue, you should to suggest the TFS administrators to delete the old history or test result data periodically in TFS 2010(using VS or other clients), we don’t recommend to edit the TFS database directly.    

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John Qiao [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 4

Carolyn,

I'm not an expert on this particular area but I'm willing to learn. Grant Holliday from our Australian subsidiary has a blog post which describes the benefits of using the new Test Attachment Cleaner to reduce the amount of data in the Team Project Collection database that's used by Test Attachments. At the bottom of the post he also goes through a list of the database tables which are most likely to grow to very large sizes. Maybe you can take a look at the size of those tables in your database and see which ones are outsized relative to the others. From there we can make a recommendation on how to proceed.

Here's that blog post.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/granth/archive/2011/02/12/tfs2010-test-attachment-cleaner-and-why-you-should-be-using-it.aspx

Thanks,
P. Kelley