When upgrading to 7.9 the UTC step caused MSSQL TEMPDB to grow to over 50 Gig. Does anyone know if there is a way to run the step externally or why it consumes so much disk space?

Is it the tempdb or the transaction log that grows so big?  The upgrade to UTC converts every date and time in the database to UTC, so almost all records get touched and modified.

TEMPDB

TempDB will not automatically shrink when the upgrade completes, so a DBA may need to look at the size and compare it with the size before upgrade and shrink it back to the size before the upgrade.

Thanks Paul.  We are putting TEMPDB on a separate drive and will monitor it during the upgrade today.