Policy-Based Management (PBM) was introduced with SQL Server 2008 – it’s a declarative system for ensuring the system configuration hasn’t drifted from the original configuration intent.  You can read more about Policy-Based Management in SQL Server Books Online, here . To help people get started...

Brent Ozar and Thomas LaRock do a 3 part video series on the power of Policy-based Management (PBM). Interestingly SCOM comes up several times in the discussion.   They cover the basics of PBM and Thomas goes into more depth on how he’s using it in his environment. The series is about 35 minutes...

Today compliance is a huge focus area for IT. Since compliance is written by lawyers for lawyers it takes a fair amount of translation to get it to the point where IT can understand what processes, policies, and configuration to implement to meet the requirements for a given compliance spec. If you...

@ the SQL PASS Summit on 11/20 we announced our plans to release new capabilities for improving the collaboration between Data-Tier Developers and DBA and to address Multi-Server (or multi-instance) manageability for SQL Server. Anthony Carrabino has a great posting describing these capabilities. I won...

JC Cannon, Senior PM on the SQL Server team, presents this webcast where he explores some of the new features in SQL Server 2008 and describes how they can be used to help an organization address their compliance needs.   In the webcast JC covers: Identity management Data protection Separation of...

I'm writing this on the plane from Orlando back to Seattle. I have lots of thoughts on TechEd that I'll try to get through before I run out of battery or the guy in front of me snaps my laptop display. I also want to answer a few of the questions that came up that I couldn't immediately answer. I'll...

Today we launched a new blog dedicated to Policy-Based Management . Take a look and send us your suggestions for topics. My goal is to have people from the PBM development team write and publish postings. Together we can make PBM an amazing feature. I'm really excited by this and I hope you are too.

I was recently asked what the exception_message and exception columns in the msdb.dbo.syspolicy_policy_execution_history_internal table are used for. There are situations where the policy evaluate can throw an exception. For example, if the policy references a property in a facet which is not available...

I recently sat down with Joey Snow over at TechNet to discuss Policy-Based Management. You can watch the video here .

Yes, the title is correct, Declarative Management (DMF) is gone! Did I get your attention? Maybe I should elaborate. About 7 months ago we embarked on a naming project for DMF. We knew that DMF was a little too geeky and didn't necessarily describe the feature in an intuitive and meaningful way. Tehcnically...

@ Tech Ed this year I opened my session talking about how cars have evolved. The analogy is as we don't tinker with our cars anymore the same is going to have to managing data environments - and DMF is part of the initial wave that'll make this happen. In this week's Weekly Roundup of Database News from...

There's an interesting thread on the MSDN forums regarding DMF performance or more accurately the overhead of having policies on the system. If you're interesting in using policies on your system and have thoughts on an acceptable overhead go post your thoughts to the forum. Personally, I'm in the camp...

Today I presented a LiveMeeting on the Declarative Management features in the SQL Server 2008 June CTP. It should be posted shortly and is accessible here .

The new policy-based admin feature (Declarative Management) in SQL Server 2008 (code-named Katmai) can keep many aspects of the system from falling out of compliance. Some questions that come up are: "how does this work?" and "how come everything can't be enforced?" Let me tackle the first one, well...

@ TechEd 2007 I presented an overview session on new manageability features in SQL Server 2008. SQL Server Central's Steve Jones blogged about the session. Steve provides a pretty accurate account of the session (thanks Steve). This is mostly a straight forward report with a little editorial sprinkled...

There is a bug in the SQL Server 2008 June CTP that causes Declarative Management to be inoperable. The fix is very simple. Launch a command line and run the following command: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\sn.exe -Vr Microsoft.SqlServer.DmfSqlClrWrapper,89845DCD8080CC91 ...