Memory Used

In an earlier post I mentioned some general guidelines for optimizing each instance of the SQL engine. Once you've got the memory set up it is quite interesting however to observe how the engine is actually using it. Run these two queries; they both show pretty much the same thing but you may find one more useful than the other.

SELECT
(CASE WHEN ([is_modified] = 1) THEN 'Dirty' ELSE 'Clean' END) AS 'Page State',
(CASE WHEN ([database_id] = 32767) THEN 'Resource Database' ELSE DB_NAME (database_id) END) AS 'Database Name',
COUNT (*) AS 'Page Count'
FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors
GROUP BY [database_id], [is_modified]
ORDER BY [Page Count], [is_modified];
GO

SELECT count(*)AS cached_pages_count, (count(*) * 8)/1024 As Mbytes,  db_name(database_id)
FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors
GROUP BY db_name(database_id) ,database_id
ORDER BY cached_pages_count DESC;
GO

The amount of memory used naturally varies depending upon which queries are running at any particular time, but by monitoring this when you are under "memory pressure" you can easily identify the culprit database. This can then guide you whether it makes sense to reallocate that database to a different SQL instance, or perhaps allocate a deeper inspection to what queries are running against it.

To that end, you can run this script:

SELECT        session_id, text, requested_memory_kb,
    granted_memory_kb, used_memory_kb
FROM            sys.dm_exec_query_memory_grants MG
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle) 
ORDER BY 3 DESC

that will show you the /current/ allocation for any running queries. If you need greater detail down at the table index level, you can run this script:

select
       count(*)as cached_pages_count, obj.name as objectname,
       ind.name as indexname, obj.index_id as indexid
from sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors as bd
    inner join
    (
SELECT     p.object_id AS objectid, object_name(p.object_id) AS name, p.index_id, au.allocation_unit_id
FROM       sys.allocation_units au INNER JOIN
sys.partitions p ON au.container_id = p.hobt_id AND (au.type = 1 OR au.type = 3)      
        union all
SELECT     p.object_id AS objectid, object_name(p.object_id) AS name, p.index_id, au.allocation_unit_id
FROM       sys.allocation_units au INNER JOIN
sys.partitions p ON au.container_id = p.partition_id AND au.type = 2
    ) as obj
on bd.allocation_unit_id = obj.allocation_unit_id
left outer join sys.indexes ind on  obj.objectid = ind.object_id and  obj.index_id = ind.index_id
where bd.database_id = db_id() and bd.page_type in ('data_page', 'index_page')
group by obj.name, ind.name, obj.index_id
order by cached_pages_count desc