What is TempDB Spill in SQL Server? – Interview Question of the Week #259

Question: What is TempDB Spill in SQL Server?

Answer: When SQL Server poorly (incorrectly) estimates the number of rows that will be returned from any operator, it requests an incorrect amount of memory grant from the SQL Server engine, which leads to an inefficient execution plan. If the inefficient plan has a relatively small memory grant, SQL Server will need additional space on the disk to do the necessary work (like join, order by). When SQL Server uses TempDB when any query does not have enough memory to do its operation, it is called TempDB Spill.

What is TempDB Spill in SQL Server? - Interview Question of the Week #259 TempDB-Spill-800x234

Whenever you see any execution plan with a TempDB Spill, trust me there are always chances that you can improve that queries performance. Here are a few generic suggestions:

  • Update statistics with full scan
  • Create covering indexes
  • Use temp tables instead of subqueries
  • Divide a huge query into multiple small queries
  • Re-write queries to avoid parameter sniffing
  • Many more…

There are many different ways you can improve the performance of the query, and not anyone solution works for every query.

Whenever I see the TempDB Spill my personal instinct is to look at the query and try to understand if there is anything we can do to avoid the spills without changing anything in the schema.

In recent times, I have seen parameter sniffing also big trouble during my Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check. Here is a set of articles that I have written that can be very helpful if you are facing any performance problem due to parameter sniffing issues.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)

Execution Plan, SQL Memory, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL TempDB
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