I really like the dbatools project. This is a series of PowerShell cmdlets that are built by the community and incredibly useful for migrations between SQL Servers, but also for various administrative actions. I have a short series on these items.

In SQL Server 2016, the setup program was altered to better configure tempdb at installation time. This was in response to the observation that few people actually make any changes to the default configuration, which was suboptimal in SQL Server 2014-.

Going through and checking all of the configurations you have isn’t easy, and isn’t necessarily the type of work that anyone wants to do. dbatools makes this really easy and quick with Test-DbaTempDbConfiguration.

Using this cmdlet is easy. I’ll call this with an instance and get results of a number of checks that are useful for your tempdb configuration:

This isn’t necessarily easy to read, so let’s add a Format-Table.

That’s not great, as I’m missing the CurrentSetting field. I’ll add a SELECT and include the fields I want. I can even add multiple instances in here:

Now I can scan through here, looking to see if my settings have deviated from the recommendations and best practices. This could easily be used to filter the results for items that don’t match, save the results as a CSV, and you now have a picklist of items to work on as you find time.

dbatools is an essential tool for me. I’d urge you to download the module and experiment with the cmdlets.