Resource Governor: Reducing Dastardly Behaviour in SQL Server 2025

SQL Server 2025 increases the memory limits available to Standard Edition, making it far more practical to consolidate multiple databases and workloads onto a single instance. For many organisations, this means stacking more systems with different usage patterns, priorities, and performance characteristics onto shared infrastructure.

That consolidation makes performance problems harder to manage, monitor, and diagnose. Issues are less likely to come from a single obviously bad query and more likely to emerge from the interaction between otherwise reasonable workloads competing for memory, CPU, and TempDB. Symptoms often appear at the instance level, while the root causes remain difficult to isolate.

Resource Governor, now available in Standard Edition, is frequently suggested as a way to control these situations. It has a mixed reputation because it is often used to contain problems rather than understand them. While it can be effective at limiting resource consumption between workloads, it can also mask underlying design issues or make troubleshooting more complex if applied without a clear goal.

In this session, we will examine what Resource Governor actually controls, how it affects memory grants, CPU scheduling, and TempDB usage, and how it behaves in heavily consolidated environments. We will focus on recognising when Resource Governor can genuinely improve stability, when it makes diagnosis harder, and when it is being used as a substitute for fixing the workload itself.

This session is not a configuration walkthrough or a feature tour. It is about using Resource Governor deliberately, with a clear understanding of what problem you are trying to solve, rather than hoping it will make a difficult system easier to live with.

After attending this session, you will be able to: Recognise when performance problems in consolidated SQL Server instances are caused by workload interaction rather than individual poorly written queries. Decide when Resource Governor is an appropriate tool for isolating workloads, and when its use is likely to make diagnosis and troubleshooting harder. Evaluate the impact Resource Governor has on memory grants, CPU scheduling, and TempDB usage in busy, multi-database environments.