Setting Memory #SQLNewBlogger

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBlogger s.

I had a great time away, and upon my return, I found lots of emails and messages to review from work. One of these was a note that Kevin Hill had updated his article on misconfigured SQL Server instances . I’d worked with Kevin before I left and thought this was a great topic. As I reviewed his update, I started thinking about one thing: memory.

I typically run 3-4 instances on a host. I usually do this to test different versions and their effect on Redgate products or to review questions from the SQL Server community. I don’t have unlimited memory, however, and need to be careful. At times I’ll set an older version of SQL Server to not start so that I don’t have too much memory pressure for my regular tasks.

I’d like to think I do a good job of setting up SQL Servers, and I did a double check on one of my machines. Sure enough, I had:

This was my SQL 2016 instance, which is the main one. For the 2014 and 2017 instances, I’d reduced this to 4096 as I use those less frequently. However, for SQL Server 2019, I got this:

The error is expected, since I set this up quickly after it was released (and before vacation) and hadn’t done anything. In this case, I need to enable advanced options.

I do that like this:

EXEC dbo.sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1 GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

That will turn on the option, so when I run the memory command it works.

That’s not ideal, so let’s lower it to 4096. I can do that like this:

EXEC sp_configure 'max server memory', 4096 GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

This will change the memory SQL Server uses. The doc pages describes this, and since I’ve done little on this instance, it hasn’t used much memory. My setting doesn’t do much, but it will prevent more pressure from activity in the future.

SQLNewBlogger

This was a quick post. Once I read the article and realized I ought to check things, I also realized this is a nice, short topic to write about and share with others. If you haven’t checked the settings on your dev machine, do so.

And write about it.