Last week, Shaun Stuart posted some questions on his blog about PBM " strangeness ". He was wondering why some properties like "AutoClose" show up in more than one facet, and then why some of those facets support "check on change : prevent" but others...

Hi, If you rename your computer, then "check on schedule policies" won't work because the old machine name is embedded in the SQL Agent jobs. To make this (and a lot of other stuff) work after a machine rename, execute the following procedure: ...

Hi, We ship these two Best Practices policies Place Data and Log Files on Separate Drives Backup Files Must Be on Separate Devices from the Database Files Unfortunately, neither of those two policies can detect separate physical devices...

We ship a "Microsoft Best Practices: Security" policy called " Guest Permissions on User Databases ". Unfortunately, the wording in the UI and BOL is not clear about whether this can/should apply to msdb . Here is what is says today: "You can do...

Our colleague Jens Suessmeyer in Germany has figured out how to generate the list of all facets and their properties. He has posted the list on his blog. Below is the code snippet from Jens: foreach ( FacetInfo info in PolicyStore .Facets) {     ...

I hosted a PBM break out session in Microsoft MVP Summit 2009 in March. One feedback I got is that the rules for what evaluation modes a policy support are obtuse. I thought that would be a good topic to cover in the blog. In PBM, users can specify the...

Bart Duncan (a dev on the manageability team and one of the masterminds behind the Management Data Warehouse and Data Collector feature in SQL Server 2008) has a blog posting where he walks through using PBM to author a complex server "health"...

SQL Server 2008 includes several predefined policies. These are generally associated with best practices and overtime the rules from the Best Practices Analyzer will be implemented as policies for PBM. A number of these have already been implemented and...

Policy categories have two purposes in SQL2K8: 1) organization of policies and 2) policy scope. In this posting we'll explore creating categories for each of these purposes. Creating Categories There are two ways to create a category: 1) the Manage Categories...

You may notice I've changed the blog format from narrow to wide. I think this makes it more readable as it uses more screen real estate - less scrolling! Let me know what you think. Or let me know if you think I'm obsessing too much about something insignificant...

We get this question a lot: can I use PBM against a SQL2K & SQL2K5 instances. The quick answer is yes but in a limited fashion. PBM is ultimately based on SMO (SQL Server Management Objects) and SMO supports SQL2K, SQL2K5, and SQL2K8. PBM relies on...

One of the key development tenets of Policy-Based Management was to raise the level of abstraction of management. The analogy I've used time and time again is Security Zones in Internet Explorer. Prior to Security Zones we had to scroll through pages...

Another PBM Blog (APBMB)! Lara Rubbelke has been blogging a bunch about PBM. Check out her blog here .

Sethu Srinivasan, a developer on the PBM team, wrote a blog post for a sample PowerShell script that will create a new policy to check XPCMDSHELL and save it to an XML file.

@ TechEd SQL Server MVP Peter DeBetta and I presented a session where we created a PowerShell script for running a group of policies against a group of servers. The script was then automated using the PowerShell subsystem in SQL Server Agent. The result...

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth Edition) defines facet as: One of numerous aspects, as of a subject . The definition of Aspect (from the same dictionary) is: Appearance to the eye, especially from a specific vantage point...

In the previous posting we introduced the main PBM concepts through the use of a sample policy: All stored procedures in the database must start with "usp_". In this posting we will walk through the creation of that policy using the PBM GUI...

This posting provides an overview of Policy-Based Management (PBM). You can read more about PBM in SQL Server 2008 Books On-line . Many of the ad hoc problems DBAs experience are caused by unwanted configuration changes or configuration changes that don...

Bill Richards recently wrote a nice article for SQL Server Central. You can read the original article here . The article covered a checklist DBAs should follow each morning. Buck Woody in his weekly podcast, Real World DBA Episode 5 - The DBA Checklist...

Well hello there and welcome to the SQL Server blog devoted to Policy-Based Management - PBM. PBM, a feature introduced in SQL Server 2008, is designed to radically change the way administrators manage the data platform. SQL Server 2008 puts in place...