How can I disable publishing of binary files to the TFS DB?

Question

TFS2010 database is growing fast (50GB per month) because of our TFS builds. We noticed that tbl_attachmentcontent table contains some binary (dll) files and some files related to instrumentation and TQAgents... All content seems to be unit test related.

I tried to find something how to stop growing of TFS DB because of unit tests. I found this suggestion to disable publishing of unit test results to the TFS.

How can I disable publishing of binary files to the TFS DB? Is it possible to disable publishing of specific content? What will be missing in the TFS when I disable publising unit tets results to the TFS?

At about 400+ unit tests are running every build including code coverage results and huge build log (500+ C# compiled projects with a lot of dependencies).

I'd like to have build retention policy set to "Kepp all", because of build statistics.

Answer 1

All I know that test result is not a binary file, but it's XML file with (.trx) extension, for your question about what happen if you stop publish test result, the build server just attache the test result with the build so you can view the result by click on the test result on the build result, so you just download the file and start viewing the result by the visual studio, otherwise you will not be able to see it.

This is what I think.

Update

You can see this link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/anutthara/archive/2011/10/30/gsjgd.aspx

Answer 2

I did some testing and here are the results:

1) You can disable unit test publishing. Your unit tests results file (trx) is not uploaded to the TFS DB. This is not problem for me, because I'm using Trx2Html tool to convert results to the HTML format. If test failed, converted HTML formatted report is sent by E-Mail to notify developer team.

2) You can enable compression on the dbo.tbl_AttachmentContent table. In our case compressed content is 5% from original.

3) Use this tool to clean up dbo.tbl_AttachmentContent table