SQL Server Policy-Based Management

Generate the List of All Available Facets and Their Properties

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) {     

Policy Evaluation Modes

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

Defining Complex Server "Health" Policies in SQL2K8

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"

Out-Of-Box Policies

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

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

Using PBM Against SQL2K and SQL2K5

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

ExecuteSql()

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

PowerShell Script for Creating a Policy to a File

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.

Creating A Policy With the GUI

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

Policy-Based Management Overview

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't

The DBA Morning Checklist

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,