SQL SERVER � Huge Space Used by Table sysxmitqueue in MSDB.

How to Clear it
Quickly?
July 6, 2019
Pinal Dave
SQL
No Comments
SQL SERVER - Huge Space Used by Table sysxmitqueue in MSDB. How to Clear it
Quickly? msdb-800x697 Recently I was helping a customer who hired me for my
services. He had an issue where they noticed that the size of the MSDB database has
grown huge. Most of the situations I have been contacted when LDF (transaction log
file) for the database is huge. But this time it was data file which was consuming
a lot of space.

In the past, I have seen huge MSDB size and written below blogs.

SQL SERVER � Stop Growing MSDB Database by Removing sysmail_mailitems History

SQL SERVER � MSDB Database Uncontrolled Growth Due to Queue_messages. How to Clear
All Messages from a Queue?
If you are not hitting one of the above-listed issues, then read further.

Solarwinds
Since we confirmed this was due to the MDF file, we needed to figure out which
table is consuming a lot of space. Below is the query which I used:

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SELECT OBJECT_NAME(object_id) AS Table_Name
,SUM(rows) AS Total_Rows
FROM sys.partitions
WHERE index_id IN (0,1)
GROUP BY object_id
ORDER BY 2 DESC;
We found that it was sys.sysxmitqueue table which was bloated in size. Microsoft
documentation says this table contains a row for each Service Broker transmission
queue. I asked from my client if they are aware of any service broker
implementation on this server and someone told that they did deploy some monitoring
script.

WORKAROUND/SOLUTION � MSDB
This should be implemented if you are sure that you are OK to lose the data in the
service broker queue. I double checked with my client and they were OK to clear all
conversations from the queue because they were not needed. In fact, they were ready
to clean up whatever objects were created by the script. Here is the silver bullet
to fix the issue.

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ALTER DATABASE [msdb] SET NEW_BROKER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
As I mentioned above, the script would discard ALL the messages without attempting
delivery.

If you are using service broker for your application, then you need to fix the
application that is sending those messages else database will grow back again.