How to Spell and Capitalize tempdb for SQL Server

No matter what I write in this post, some of y’all are going to tell me I’m wrong. That’s inevitable, because I’m writing about tempdb: a database so complex and mysterious in SQL Server, that even the spelling and capitalization of the database name is a topic of great disagreement.

Note: Nearly Everyone Has Been Inconsistent About This

You might think, “This is easy, just check Microsoft’s documentation to find the answer.”

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How to Cause a Simple Spill to tempdb

Sometimes it’s useful to know how to cause a problem.

Maybe you’ve never encountered the problem, and want to get hands-on experience. Maybe you’re testing a monitoring tool, and want to see if a condition flags an alert. Maybe you’re testing out a new client tool, and want to see how it displays it.

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Row Width Impact on Version Store Usage under Snapshot Isolation

A question came up in my webcast today on the topic of Snapshot and Read Committed Snapshot Isolation - what impact will enabling these have on my SQL Server instance?

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Parallelism and tempdb data file usage in SQL Server

I’m sometimes asked if the number of CPU cores used by a query determines the number of tempdb files that the query can use.

Good news: even a single threaded query can use multiple tempdb data files.

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Free Poster: tempdb data files in SQL Server

The tempdb database is a strange place in SQL Server.

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Incorrect Results: Why You Should Not Ignore Patches for SQL Server

Patching isn’t fun. It’s time consuming, thankless, and easy to break stuff.

But you can’t skip it. For critical systems, you need to subscribe to patch lists for SQL Server and review issues that are fixed regularly.

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