TFS Warehouse/Cube Processing

Just to clarify the different tools that you can use to update/recreate the Team Foundation Server warehouse (relational database and OLAP cube).

Warehouse Web Service

You can browse and invoke it here (always locally from TFS): http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx

The Run operation will launch processing of the warehouse (you can check the status of the warehouse with the GetWarehouseStatus operation: it goes from ProcessingAdapters, ProcessingOlap and finally Idle). Processing of the warehouse means (1) pulling data from the operational stores (source control, work items, builds) to the data warehouse relational database, and (2) processing the cube to aggregate the data from the relational database.

TFSServerScheduler

Windows service that signals the warehouse web service to go aggregate data and process the cube. This windows service calls the above warehouse run operation at regular intervals.

To find out when was the last time the scheduler called the warehouse to process, browse to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2005\TfsServerScheduler. The xml file in that directory will contain the last time warehouse processing was attempted.

In Team Foundation2008, the scheduler is called "Visual Studio Team Foundation ServerTask Scheduler".

Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252450(VS.80).aspx

Cube processing

You can also process the cube manually from the SQL Server Management Studio. This will only perform the second step above, so if new data has not been transfered from the operational stores to the data warehouse relational database, you will not see any changes.

Setupwarehouse.exe

You can find this tool here: %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2005\Tools

It is used to rebuild the OLAP schema and cube or the relational database. This means that it will delete all the data in the TfsWarehouse database and cube. You will neeed to run the warehouse web service afterwards in order to recover

Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms400783(VS.80).aspx

I have noticed that af'ter running Setupwarehouse.exe to rebuild the relational database, some fields are missing. This concerns the Microsoft_VSTS_* fields in the Current Work Item table, for example. As a consequence, some measures are missing from the Team System cube (Current Work Item | Remaining Work, for example). After running the warehouse web service (that pulls data into the relational database) they reappear ...