Policy Management

The good thing about a Policy is that you don’t have to have a copy on every single server to be able to enforce it. This makes Policy Based Management very appealing to DBAs who have a central server which they can use to create and hold policies to then run against multiple other instances on the network in order to bring them into line without having to create numerous different policies on numerous different sets of servers.

In most SQL Server environments with fast moving data we want to ensure that we will suffer the least amount of data loss in an outage or disaster. This means using the FULL recovery model. There are some circumstances in which someone might wish to change the database to a SIMPLE mode in order to, for example, shrink a runaway transaction log.

Having Policy Management set up is great… being able to schedule a job to start up, check your systems, and report anything that doesn’t fit your ideal is fantastic. But what about those policy breaches which cannot be automatically rolled back (On Change: Prevent is not an option) but for which you want to be immediately notified?

This was a new feature added to SQL Server 2008 and it’s just superb. I honestly don’t think it gets the appreciation that it deserves as it seems to be rarely seen or used despite the control it can give you over your instances.