SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer - Progress

Thank you to everybody who posted comments in newsgroups, forums, and on the first SQL Server™ Best Practices Analyzer blog entry.  We have been able to complete a lot of your requests already.

We’ve had some great short-term success with SQL BPA 2.0.  Thanks to a lot of help from the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer team, in just a couple of weeks we’ve been able to put together a prototype with the following features:

• A good looking, functional GUI
• An extensible engine to execute rules
• About 10 configuration/security checks for SQL Server 2005 database engine
• A few rules for SQL Server Analysis Services
• One basic check for SQL Server Integration Services packages
• Multiple reports (view by issue type or server)
• Ability to save your scan as XML or export the report you’re viewing to HTML

All of this is very exciting.  In the coming month, we will be adding a few more features to the prototype in case we get the opportunity to demo it at a conference like TechEd.  More importantly, we will continue our investigation on a few topics:

• What level of support will we have for SQL Server 2000?
• What features and rules from the original version of BPA will we transition?
• Will we provide the ability for people to write custom rules?
• Should we localize this tool?  

These are four of the most difficult questions we face in the project.  I could write an entire blog entry about the difficulties with each of these topics.  Each one could dramatically change the scope of the project.  The more feedback we get from customers, the better we can judge what is important.  I’ll post a blog entry on one of these four topics within the next two weeks.  Please let me know which one interests you the most.

-Paul