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Finding High-Variance Memory Grants

Erin Stellato shows how you can use Query Store to track the variance of memory grant requests:

One of the more perplexing problems to troubleshoot in SQL Server can be those related to memory grants. Some queries need more memory than others to execute, based on what operations need to be performed (e.g. sort, hash). SQL Server’s optimizer estimates how much memory is needed, and the query must obtain the memory grant in order to start executing. It holds that grant for the duration of query execution – which means if the optimizer overestimates memory you can run into concurrency issues. If it underestimates memory, then you can see spills in tempdb. Neither is ideal, and when you simply have too many queries asking for more memory than is available to grant, you’ll see RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE waits. There are multiple ways to attack this issue, and one of my new favorite methods is to use Query Store.

Click through for a demonstration.