maxdop

I’m sometimes asked if the number of CPU cores used by a query determines the number of tempdb files that the query can use.

Good news: even a single threaded query can use multiple tempdb data files.

Learn how to configure the Max Degree of Parallelism and Cost Threshold for Parallelism settings in SQL Server - and how SQL Server 2014 SP2 and SQL Server 2016 change the way that SQL Server automatically configures some SQL Servers with lots of cores.