Group Policy for SQL Server 2008 – the Declarative Management Framework (DMF)

Microsoft's Active Directory has enabled Group Policy since Windows 2000. Policies can be set once then applied continually to hundreds or even thousands of machines within a network enabling central control of both client and server machines. Wouldn't that be nice for SQL Server specific features?

Now we can use the DMF as a powerful new feature of SQL Server 2008. SQL Server DBA's can define configuration policies against multiple servers, databases, tables and indexes enabling enforcement and consistency of database objects across multiple servers. Policies can be enabled to either "prevent" or "log" object properties that are "out-of-compliance".

A simple example may be to enforce naming conventions of stored procedures within a database. A choice can be made whether to prevent out-of-compliance objects (in which case the CREATE PROCEDURE statement will fail) or to just log the non-compliance that can be reviewed in a report. Another example may be to prevent SQL Mail from being configured on a group of SQL Servers (a very good idea!). All policies can be easily defined using SQL Server Management Studio. Individual policies can be grouped into categories and applied to targets (e.g. servers, databases, tables, indexes) or target hierarchies (e.g. all tables in a particular schema or all databases on a server). This feature will greatly simplify multi-server administration and standards management, but you have to pay for it. It is slated currently as an Enterprise Edition feature.

Yes, someone from the SQL Server team must have had lunch with the Active Directory folks during Katmai development. That's good news for us as SQL Server 2008 users.
Cheers,
Brian

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