After Kalen's excellent keynote our SQL Server MVP Tibor Karaszi entered the stage to dive into the new Resource Governor, one of the features that are there to strengthen the Maintainability aspect of SQL Server.

The resource governor is added to the Enterprise version of SQL Server 2008 and gives a DBA the ability to slice and limit resources for jobs running in the database server. Tibor did a "simple" demo were he created two logins, one for marketing and one for developers and then he divided the resources based on that login.

That is how the RG does it's magic. By classifying an incoming connection it assigns that connection to a "Workload Group" which in turn is associated with a "Resource Pool". When this association is the resource pools can be configured to allow max or min amount of a CPU's time or of the installed memory.

Sadly only CPU and memory can be managed in this way, there is no support for dividing I/O time but Tibor showed a glimpse of hope where he delivered the Microsoft mantra "next version".

Apparently there is no way to read the resource usage afterwards, thus making it really hard to do things like debit a client for the resources they use. It is possible to extend the RG with "Extended Events" to build your own home-grown debit functionality but that could be a lot of work.

One of the things making it hard to debit is that the RG only really kicks in when the resources are maxed out.

A really interesting session and I can see how this feature will enable more companies to host SQL Server in the cloud for their clients and multi-tenant SQL Server installations will be better managed.

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Sql Summit 2008 Event site:

http://www.expertzone.se/sql2k8/

More information about the Resource Governor

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/per/Resource_Governor_in_SQL_Server_2008_p1.aspx

A Demo-Webcast of the Resource Governor by Tibor (In Swedish):

http://www.cornerstone.se/sv/Roller/IT-tekniker/SQL-Server/Demo-Tv-SQL-Server/Demo-TV-Resource-Governor-SQL-2008/

Tibor's blog:

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/tibor_karaszi/