Memory Grants: The mysterious SQL Server memory consumer with Many Names


First published on MSDN on Jan 01, 2013
The Memory Consumer with Many Names

Have you ever wondered what Memory grants are? What about QE Reservations ? And Query Execution Memory ? Workspace memory ? How about Memory Reservations ?

As with most things in life, complex concepts often reduce to a simple one: all these names refer to the same memory consumer in SQL Server: memory allocated during query execution for Sort and Hash operations (bulk copy and index creation fit into the same