Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Post History

75%
+4 −0
Q&A Is there any justification for having a single tempdb database to be used by all databases on a SQL Server intstances?

I can't speak for the designers' motivations, but here are some possible reasons: It's simple. Having one tempdb for everything is likely simpler to implement and simpler to configure. It works...

posted 3y ago by Derek Elkins‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Derek Elkins‭ · 2021-10-10T22:51:17Z (about 3 years ago)
I can't speak for the designers' motivations, but here are some possible reasons:

 * It's simple. Having one tempdb for everything is likely simpler to implement and simpler to configure.
 * It works. A lot of the time the shared tempdb isn't a problem. When it is, your links provide some mitigation. If it still remains a problem, then you can use separate servers to resolve it and there's a decent chance you would need to do that for other reasons as well, i.e. the shared tempdb isn't your only performance problem.
 * It's easier to manage. You can set one quota size for the tempdb rather than one for each per-database tempdb. Further, you don't need to try to predict and over-allocate how much temp space each DB would need. You can easily stripe and/or host the tempdb on a different disk as suggested in your links.
 * SQL Server supports cross-database queries for which it is not obvious which tempdb should be used in your proposed scheme.
 * It shares infrastructure, e.g. the log file.

My understanding is that early^[For my purposes here, I'm defining "early" as circa SQL Server 2000 as, according to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_SQL_Server), there was a major rewrite shortly before then] in SQL Server's life one of its major selling points was simpler database management relative to other products at the time (i.e. Oracle, DB2). My understanding is a large part of this accomplished by reducing and simplifying the configurability, e.g. by using algorithms that were inherently more adaptive, incorporating "auto-tuning" algorithms internally, or simply not providing the ability to configure certain aspects. I'm speculating here, but I also suspect tempdb contention was likely much less of an issue at the time than tempdb allocation. Having a single shared tempdb simplified management and made it easy to allocate a set amount of disk space for temporary data. Being shared, it would also allow any database to use as much of that temporary storage as it needed in a burst of work while not requiring allocating temporary storage for each database in accordance to its worst-case usage.

I could easily imagine a new, mostly from-scratch database (re-)implementation by Microsoft choosing to make databases more isolated and significantly eliminating shared resource to improve scalability/elasticity.