TempDB SQL Server Monitoring

Maintain TempDB health with performance and utilization insights

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Monitor and Analyze

Identifying Performance Issues

Insights & Views

Activity

Monitor and analyze TempDB

The performance of the TempDB database is critical to your overall SQL Server performance. The TempDB view in SolarWinds SQL Sentry^® Portal (our web interface) offers enhanced visibility into TempDB activity and usage. You can easily analyze key health and utilization metrics to troubleshoot and prevent performance bottlenecks and optimize TempDB configuration.

Using the TempDB Summary chart, you can see a concise overview of TempDB file space usage between version store, internal objects, user objects, mixed events, and free space. With a detailed overview of what’s affecting TempDB performance, you can better anticipate and address issues across your SQL Server instance.

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Identify critical performance issues in TempDB

Tempdb is arguably one of the most critical databases in SQL Server. Developers and SQL Server use it for a wide array of things—versioning, temporary tables, table variables, query plan operations, cursors, triggers, LOB variables—that you must consider when designing and developing SQL Server applications. TempDB can cause cascading performance issues across your SQL Server instance if misconfigured.

Insight into the things that are using TempDB, and how effectively they are using it, is crucial to troubleshooting and preventing contention. The TempDB view in SQL Sentry Portal, the installed SQL Sentry web interface, provides you with a dedicated interface to view important storage and utilization metrics.

When timeout errors or unresponsive applications occur, it may not be immediately apparent that the problem is linked to your SQL Server TempDB. Typically, experienced application users find issues, but it falls on a DBA to conduct a root cause analysis, eventually leading to TempDB. This is where TempDB monitoring can help with SQL Server performance obstacles. With proper data collection and analytics, you have the tools to reduce troubleshooting time from days to minutes.

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Easily view available insights, tables queries, and charts

The TempDB view in SQL Sentry Portal provides you with insight into what is using your TempDB database—and, more importantly, how effectively it’s being used.

In conjunction with other monitoring features in SQL Sentry, you can optimize both the TempDB configuration and the applications using it.

SQL Sentry provides additional TempDB monitoring information via the Top SQL view, integrated Plan Explorer, the Disk Space and Disk Activity tabs (Storage tab in Portal), Advisory Conditions, the Performance Analysis Dashboard, and various canned reports.

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Keep an eye on TempDB activity

Knowing what’s happening in the TempDB database is just as crucial as understanding object and storage distribution. SQL Sentry Portal provides insight into activity metrics such as active temp tables, non-snapshot version transactions, and snapshot transactions.

Our TempDB Session Usage chart, allows you to select an area on the Activity chart to view detailed metrics that assist with troubleshooting issues and optimizing performance.

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Get More on TempDB SQL Server

Do you find yourself asking…

How does TempDB work?
What goes into TempDB?
How does TempDB relate to SQL Server performance?
What are the four common TempDB performance problems?
What are the fundamentals of TempDB monitoring?
Why is it important to understand TempDB distinctions?

TempDB is a database in SQL Server that stores temporary user objects, such as local or global temporary tables and stored procedures. It also holds the intermediate results of sorting operations, row versioning data for features like snapshot isolation level, and other transient data generated by users or the system. It gets recreated every time SQL Server restarts, so it does not maintain persistent state information between restarts. The system database "model" is used as a template when SQL Server creates databases.

The four common performance issues you may encounter in TempDB include:

Misconfiguration: The best practices for configuring TempDB can vary between major SQL Server versions. Many professionals will find multiple versions in their data centers or cloud providers, but proper configuration is key to TempDB performance regardless of version. Getting this right up front can dramatically reduce future run-ins with TempDB. Considerations such as size, number of data files, and storage performance are all important factors when avoiding common problems with TempDB.

Disk, Log, or Data Files Are Full (TempDB Full In SQL Server): TempDB is often overlooked or taken for granted because it usually functions as expected. However, DBAs are well aware of the potential issues that can arise when TempDB fails to operate properly. This is why we've brought attention to parasites because there is typically much more activity happening in TempDB than the workload your team has created and accounted for.

When a user database runs out of storage space, we tend to panic and hustle to fix one application—but what about TempDB? All too often, it's forgotten, which can lead to disastrous consequences when it runs out of space. TempDB can grow wildly due to a transaction that didn't roll back or from index maintenance. Therefore, proper capacity planning is essential for optimal TempDB performance.

PFS Page Contention: When discussing pages in SQL Server, we often immediately think of storage and IO. However, this scenario is more related to management objects. Data pages within the database track the allocation of storage and other objects. Since multiple threads can simultaneously compete for access to a single page, some operations may have to wait if there aren't enough data files providing sufficient throughput. This issue is exacerbated when TempDB allocates hundreds or thousands of tables frequently, resulting in users waiting longer in the application.

Availability Groups and Version Store Bloat: The version store is essential to understanding TempDB performance. This situation occurs when a transaction runs for too long or gets stuck, and the version store cleanup cannot be performed. As the name implies, the purpose of this cleanup is to remove old versions from the version store that are no longer necessary. Doing so frees up space in TempDB for new data and other objects. If this process does not occur, leftover versions will continue to accumulate until all available storage has been used up. For this reason, ongoing TempDB SQL Server monitoring is crucial for keeping a close eye on your TempDB performance.

TempDB is a database in SQL Server that stores temporary user objects, such as local or global temporary tables and stored procedures. It also holds the intermediate results of sorting operations, row versioning data for features like snapshot isolation level, and other transient data generated by users or the system. It gets recreated every time SQL Server restarts, so it does not maintain persistent state information between restarts. The system database "model" is used as a template when SQL Server creates databases.
TempDB data is organized into three categories:
User data and objects: The activity of your devs, apps, and users
Internal data and objects: The activity of the SQL Server
Version store: A subset of internal data
There are also additional items can use TempDB that we may not be aware of, such as table variables and #temp tables which are both stored in TempDB within SQL Server.

TempDB SQL Server monitoring can help you avoid costly performance issues

SolarWinds SQL Sentry

Visibility into space utilization and activity metrics through easy-access dashboards
Actionable insights for preventing contention and performing root-cause analysis
View aggregated session consumption and TempDB allocations by time