Giant MSP_TASK_CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUES_SHADOW

[James Fraser]

I'm working with a Project Server 2007 instance that is a couple years old
and has built up really big MSP_TASK_CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUES_SHADOW tables in
both published and draft databases. They take up more than 10 GB in each of
the 25 GB databases. Since these DBs are about to be moved around a lot to
other servers, we'd love to trim out some excess.

I see that entries to these table have dates. About a quarter of the rows
don't match a TaskUID. About half the rows are more than a year old.

Has anyone tried to clean these tables up? Anyone else have these tables
taking over their database? My understanding is that this table keeps track
of changed custom field values (in case an update is submitted from before
the change, so that Server knows not to change back to the old value.) If
that's the case, it seems like I could delete any rows where I know we won't
be getting connections older than that date.

This Project Server is on SP1 Dec 2008 CU, in case it makes a difference.


Yes, I'll move slowly on this, and test first, but I'd love to hear other's
experiences. Thanks in advance for any help...

James Fraser

 

[.jussi]

Hi James,

Unfortunately I don't have an answer, but rather would like to gain from
your experience going forward with this. So any progress reports and
information you can provide as you go would be very warmly received.

As a reference, our installation has been in production for roughly a year
and a half and the _published.MSP_TASK_CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUES_SHADOW is at 22.5
GB - just for that table.

 

[Ray McCoppin]

The shadow tables are used by the cache sub system to determine what changes
have occurred (deletes) that need to be reload buy project pro. From what I
have seen these tables can get very large when using Project Server to track
process type changes (using custom fields) by editing those fields very
frequently. This is make worst by doing this at the task level or
assignments because if the numbers. I have deleted the data from these
tables using a number of different ways, but this is not supported by
Microsoft and you must test this using your process and methodology very
closely. The biggest thing you must do to delete the data in these tables is
to purge (delete) the cache on the local clients.

Hope this helps
--
Ray McCoppin

Project Server 2007 delete Project Pro Cache
Project Server 2007 Archive Tool
http://www.randsmanagement.com
SRS gantt charts

 

[Ray McCoppin]

The shadow tables are used by the cache sub system to determine what changes
have occurred (deletes) that need to be reload buy project pro. From what I
have seen these tables can get very large when using Project Server to track
process type changes (using custom fields) by editing those fields very
frequently. This is make worst by doing this at the task level or
assignments because if the numbers. I have deleted the data from these
tables using a number of different ways, but this is not supported by
Microsoft and you must test this using your process and methodology very
closely. The biggest thing you must do to delete the data in these tables is
to purge (delete) the cache on the local clients.

Hope this helps
--
Ray McCoppin

Project Server 2007 Archive Tool
Project Server 2007 Automation Tool
http://www.randsmanagement.com
SRS gantt charts