The BizTalk Tracking (BizTalkDTADb) database grows in size as BizTalk Server processes data on your system. If the size of the BizTalk Tracking database causes poor disk performance or fills up the disk subsystem, you can manually purge the data from the Tracking database. See my previous post about how to purge and maintain the BizTalkDTADb database.
If you repeatedly have issues with the BizTalk tracking database, you may want to configure BizTalk to no longer collect tracking information. This is possible by turning off global tracking for the whole BizTalk Server.
Here is the procedure to turn off tracking globally for BizTalk server 2006 and 2006 R2:
- Open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the Database Server where the BizTalk Management Database is running, BizTalkMgmtDb
- Expand the BizTalkMgmtDb, database, expend Tables, right-click the adm_Group table, and then click Open Table.
- In the GlobalTrackingOption column, change the value from 1 to 0 and then press ENTER. A value of 0 turns off global tracking for the whole BizTalk server while a value of 1 turns it on.
- Restart all your BizTalk hosts for the change to take effect.
As when Tracking is turned off, tracking information is not collected so no information will be available in HAT anymore (Health and Activity Tracking). You should consider this effect against keeping tracking data for a shorter time when thinking about turning off Tracking globally.
An alternative to turn off Tracking globally is to turn it off on an application per application basis.
I think that once a BizTalk application is deployed and running smoothly for a while, there is no reason to still have tracking turned on at all time.
If you deploy new BizTalk applications or keep updating existing ones on your production server regularly, you will probably want to be able to consult HAT after the application is freshly deployed. For that to be possible you would have to keep global tracking on.
In that case, I think that a best practice kind of approach is to have Tracking turned on for the freshly deployed application for a few days until you deem it running fine so that you do not need to consult HAT anymore. Once HAT is not needed regularly anymore, you can use the BizTalk Server Administration Console to disable tracking for all the artifacts belonging to the concerned application (orchestrations, ports, etc.). Would you need to turn it on again, it would just take a few minutes to configure tracking back on for the application’s artifacts.
Reference can be found at the MSDN BizTalk documentation How to Turn Off Global Tracking