Issues with Alerts in TFS
Every once in a while we get customers who note issues with alerts. In some cases alerts are being duplicated, items don’t show up in the alerts editor, by default you can only see alerts for yourself, etc. This makes managing alerts difficult in some cases. There’s an easy way to identify and remove unwanted alerts.
CAUTION – THIS INVOLVES GOING INTO THE TFS DATABASE – DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER
Okay, having given you that warning, here’s what you want to do:
Look in the database server for the TfsIntegration database. Run the following selects:
select * from tbl_subscription
select * from tbl_security_identity_cache
The first table gives you the list of subscriptions. However, the users aren’t displayed in the table, only the SID’s. Look in the second table for the SIDS. You can delete rows out of the tbl_subscription table without harm which will remove the alert.
Do NOT delete the first four alerts (which are not assigned to a user and don’t have a filter).
TAKE A BACKUP FIRST.
It never hurts 
Comments
By steven.shippee on March 3rd, 2009 at 11:41 am
Does this look about right as content returned from tbl_security_identity_cache?
S-1-5-19 2 LOCAL SERVICE
S-1-5-21-1033714835-1844704717-3293601285-1003 2 shis235
S-1-5-21-1033714835-1844704717-3293601285-1008 2 TFSSetup
S-1-5-21-1033714835-1844704717-3293601285-1009 2 TFSService
S-1-5-21-1033714835-1844704717-3293601285-1010 2 WSSService
S-1-5-21-1033714835-1844704717-3293601285-1011 2 TFSReports
S-1-5-21-1033714835-1844704717-3293601285-1012 2 TFSProxy
S-1-5-21-1033714835-1844704717-3293601285-500 2 Administrator
S-1-9-1551374245-1204400969-2402986413-2179408616-0-0-0-0-1 … TFS Stuff
It looks like SIDS that start with S-1-5 are regular entities while those that deal with TFS/SQL start with S-1-9, is that a constant or does it vary more than this?
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