PDB is an abbreviation for Program Data Base. As the name suggests, it is a repository (persistent storage such as databases) to maintain information required to run your program in debug mode. It contains many important relevant information required while you debug your code (in Visual Studio), for e.g. at what points you have inserted break points where you expect the debugger to break in Visual Studio.
This is the reason why many times Visual Studio fails to hit the break points if you remove the *.pdb files from your debug folders. Visual Studio debugger is also able to tell you the precise line number of code file at which an exception occurred in a stack trace with the help of *.pdb files. So effectively pdb files are really a boon to developers while debugging a program.
Generally it is not recommended to exclude the generation of *.pdb files. From production release stand-point what you should be doing is create the pdb files but don't ship them to customer site in product installer. Preserve all the generated PDB files on to a symbol server from where it can be used/referenced in future if required. Specially for cases when you debug issues like process crash. When you start analysing the crash dump files and if your original *.pdb files created during the build process are not preserved then Visual Studio will not be able to make out the exact line of code which is causing crash.
If you still want to disable generation of *.pdb files altogether for any release then go to properties of the project -> Build Tab -> Click on Advanced button -> Choose none from "Debug Info" drop-down box -> press OK as shown in the snapshot below.
Note: This setting will have to be done separately for "Debug" and "Release" build configurations.