Max Degree of Parallelism is a setting that is often changed to improve performance in SQL Server.  What exactly does Max Degree of Parallelism mean and do?

Modern processors found in servers today are much more powerful and advanced compared to when SQL Server was introduced.  The max degree of parallelism setting basically tells SQL Server how many processors to use to run queries in parallel in hopes to decrease execution time.

The default setting for max degree of parallelism is 0, which uses all processors.  You can override the “MAXDOP” in a few areas. One you can make the update to the instance as a whole with the following query:

EXEC sp_configure ‘max degree of parallelism’, –enternumberhere;

The Second area you can set MAXDOP is a query hint seen below:

Option (MAXDOP –enternumberhere);

There are recommendations provided by Microsoft on what setting to set the max degree of parallelism to. To find those recommendations click this link here. 

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