Memory consumption metrics in Fabric SQL Database
Overview
SQL Database in Fabric continues its commitment to providing you with robust tools for database management, performance monitoring, and optimization. Earlier this year, we released a performance dashboard to help you monitor and improve the performance of your SQL Database in Fabric. We’ve improved upon those performance monitoring capabilities with the ability to track memory consumption. This new capability delivers real-time, actionable data regarding the memory utilization of all database queries to help you make more informed decisions and manage SQL Database resources more efficiently.
Expanded metrics for comprehensive monitoring
With the addition of memory consumption metrics, the performance dashboard now offers a comprehensive set of metrics to help you to monitor and maintain the database. Now, you can access all the following metrics from the dashboard:
- CPU consumption
- Memory consumption (NEW!)
- User connections
- Requests per second
- Blocked queries per second
- Database size
- Automatic index information
- Query performance
Fine-grained query-level memory consumption
All memory consumption is measured at the query level, providing fine-grained insights into each individual query’s impact on overall database memory utilization. This allows administrators to pinpoint specific queries that may be consuming disproportionate resources and take action to optimize them.
Visualize memory consumption over time
Once you’re on the performance dashboard for your Fabric SQL Database, you’ll see a new tab for memory consumption. This tab visualizes a bar chart showing the total memory consumption (in MBs or GBs) for each time interval. Like other tabs in the performance dashboard, you can select from a variety of time intervals and even define your own. The bar chart is designed to help you easily spot trends and spikes in the memory consumption of your SQL database.
Easily identify tempdb spillover events
Spillovers to tempdb occur when SQL Database queries exceed the available memory during execution. When this happens, the query ‘spills over’ to tempdb to continue processing. While spillovers aren’t inherently problematic, repeated occurrences may indicate performance issues or database resource contention. The new memory consumption chart shows when a memory spillover occurred and the size of each spillover. These insights will help you identify performance bottlenecks resulting from excessive memory usage or potentially inefficient queries.
Interactive query drill-down: select, inspect, compare
Since SQL Database measures memory consumption for each query, it’s now easier than ever to see which queries are having the most impact on overall memory consumption. Not only can you see all executed queries on your Fabric SQL Database (including the ability to sort queries by multiple dimensions), but you can also click on any executed query to instantly access a detailed query view, including:
- Query text: Instantly view and copy the full query text to your favorite editor (for example, the web query editor in Fabric, Visual Studio Code, or SQL Server Management Studio) with a single click.
- Execution counts over time: See how often this query has run, helping you identify usage patterns or anomalies.
- Compare resource consumption: Effortlessly compare CPU and memory consumption for two different time periods, giving you clear visibility into how query behavior and resource usage has changed over time.
Getting Started
Please note that, at the time of publication, this feature is still rolling out to customers. It may take up to 1 month for the memory consumption view to show up in the performance dashboard for SQL Database in Fabric.
Haven’t used the performance dashboard for Fabric SQL Database yet? You’re missing out on valuable insights into your data workloads. Best of all, there’s nothing to set up. Simply navigate to your SQL Database in Fabric and select the Performance summary button in the header bar. The Performance Summary side panel will open from the right side of your screen. You can then select Performance dashboard to see more detailed insights.
For more information, check out the documentation on Performance Dashboard for SQL database in Microsoft Fabric.
We’re listening! Please share your feedback
We remain dedicated to continuous improvement and your feedback helps us further refine and expand our performance monitoring capabilities. We invite you to share your feedback and suggestions on the Fabric Ideas page.
