How to List CPU Usage Per Database in SQL Server

As a DBA there may be a time when you want to try and ascertain how much CPU time each of your databases is consuming. This is useful to complement high CPU investigations or to just try and understand which of your databases overall is the highest CPU consumer over time.

The out of the box reporting that Management Studio provides is sadly missing this report so we have to run some T-SQL to extract it.

As with other DMV’s, the statistics produced are only available from the time when the SQL Server was started and can change over the course of the day. It’s important to remember that these are cumulative figures and may not correlate to any current spike in CPU performance caused by some heavy query.

The DMV can only report on the data that is available in the plan cache. If the plan cache is experiencing lots of churn, the report becomes less accurate.

If you want to track this data over time, you will need to capture data at regular intervals and persist it to some kind of logging table or file.

So here is some code to do it:

WITH CPU_Per_Db
AS
(SELECT 
 dmpa.DatabaseID
 , DB_Name(dmpa.DatabaseID) AS [Database]
 , SUM(dmqs.total_worker_time) AS CPUTimeAsMS
 FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats dmqs 
 CROSS APPLY 
 (SELECT 
 CONVERT(INT, value) AS [DatabaseID] 
 FROM sys.dm_exec_plan_attributes(dmqs.plan_handle)
 WHERE attribute = N'dbid') dmpa
 GROUP BY dmpa.DatabaseID)
 
 SELECT 
 [Database] 
 ,[CPUTimeAsMS] 
 ,CAST([CPUTimeAsMS] * 1.0 / SUM([CPUTimeAsMS]) OVER() * 100.0 AS DECIMAL(5, 2)) AS [CPUTimeAs{96f5cbaad583fb885ff5d18ecce5734bf1e8596949521e20c290401929518f75}]
 FROM CPU_Per_Db
 ORDER BY [CPUTimeAsMS] DESC;

This is what the results looks like on my test instance.

I hope you found this useful 🙂