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Category: Policy-Based Management

Policy-Based Management for Availability Groups

Published 2020-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta takes us through the policies in Policy-Based Management which relate to Availability Groups:

SQL Server Always On uses the Policy-Based Management(PBM) for determining its health. In the earlier articles, we discovered AG dashboard features to monitor synchronization status, data loss, replica states. It executes the PBM policies on availability replicas (primary and secondary), availability group database and organizes the results in a dashboard.

The primary replica contains information for all replicas, their synchronization states. It has sufficient information to compute the health for all availability groups. If we launch the AG dashboard from the primary and secondary replica, we can note the difference in monitoring.

This is perhaps the most under-developed and under-utilized feature in SQL Server. It is conceptually so powerful and what’s in there shows some of that power, but to this day, so much is still lacking in PBM.

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Enforcing Database Practices with Policy-Based Management

Published 2020-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Nisarg Upadhyay hits on one of my favorite features Microsoft doesn’t care about anymore:

In this article, I am going to explain how we can enforce the SQL database best practices using Policy-Based Management. The policy-based management feature of SQL Server was introduced in SQL Server 2005. This feature was useful because it helps database administrators to define and enforce the database policies based on the organizations’ requirements.

Back when I was a DBA, I really appreciated Policy-Based Management. Unfortunately, although my job has changed a few times since then, Policy-Based Management hasn’t.

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SQL Server Features Forgotten But Not Gone

Published 2017-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Sheldon looks at five cobweb-ravaged parts of SQL Server:

Policy-Based Management (PBM) has a PR problem, even worse that DQS and MDS. A lot of people don’t know what it is, or if they do, are not sure if it’s still supported. Microsoft doesn’t even mention the feature in its list of Editions and supported features of SQL Server 2016. The PR problem is so bad, in fact, that I’ve come across community forum postings asking whether PBM still exists.

Despite its silent role, PBM is still a supported feature and appears to be available to all SQL Server editions, although I suspect it caters primarily to organizations with a large number of similar SQL Server implementations.

Microsoft introduced PBM in SQL Server 2008 to provide a policy-based system for managing one or more SQL Server instances. You can, for example, use policies to grant permissions on user databases, disable lightweight pooling, or choose an authentication mode. You can also target policies at specific SQL Server instances, databases, tables, or indexes.

Quick hits:  Data Quality Services and Master Data Services have been lapped by the competition and aren’t really competitive products anymore.  Policy-Based Management is still useful, and I wish it’d get some internal love to extend roles & features.  Management Data Warehouse is a tire fire that you should avoid at all costs.  Service Broker is useful in the right circumstances, but it needs a few big changes to become a great broker.  Unfortunately, I don’t see big changes happening and so there are superior alternatives for data flow (like Apache Kafka).  But read Robert’s take on these features.

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PBM Schedule Failures

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Turpin diagnoses an issue where scheduled Policy-Based Management policy checks were failing:

While it is easy to build and test policies by executing them on demand (especially powerful when run through Central Management Server) I had some issues getting my policies to run in “on schedule” mode.

To be more specific, my policies that use the ExecuteSQL function have been an issue.  What I was finding was:

  • The policy would run fine “on demand” but…
  • When I run the policy through the PBM scheduler, the policy would fail.

Dealing with false positives is not a good start for any monitoring service, so getting to the root of the issue was critical.

Read on for the solution.

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DBA Morning Checklist

Published 2015-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Pieter Vanhove has published his Policy-Based Management-based DBA Morning Checklist and has some post-Summit additions:

Optimize for Ad Hoc Workloads

The policy is going to check if the server setting Optimize for Ad Hoc Workloads, is set to True. By default, this setting is set to False.
The optimize for ad hoc workloads option is used to improve the efficiency of the plan cache for workloads that contain many single use ad hoc batches. More information can be found on https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645587.aspx

I don’t see any downside by enabling this setting.

Not many shops use PBM, so I’m happy to see Pieter contributing this to the general community.

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