Welcome

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 several key pieces of the framework for subsequent releases to build upon. The focus in SQL Server 2008 is configuration of the SQL Server Database Engine. This isn't to imply the Business Intelligence stack is not important or totally forgotten. We sliced off a very thin piece of Analysis Services and Reporting Services to cover with policies. The functionality on the BI stack is limited but the capabilities are real. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

The goal of this blog is build a PBM community. There are several people I've enlisted to contribute to this blog. The common thread is all of the contributors (at least the ones thus far) were part of the team that developed PBM in SQL Server 2008. We want the personalities of each contributor to shine through, therefore, we'll attempt to be sure the author of each posting is appropriately identified.

PBM is wonderfully powerful and as more customers adopt it we expect lots of questions, best practices, and interesting policies to pop up and to be shared with the community. As with anything new it'll take a little time for things to really get rolling but you can help. Send us feedback and submit comments with ideas for postings. Tell us what you want to hear about. I've been blogging about PBM for some time now. If you'd like to shift through some of the history of PBM (hey that'd probably be a great posting for here, a brief history of how PBM came to be) go take a look at my blog.

Before I forget I almost broke one of our initial rules, identifying the author. My name is Dan Jones. I'm a lead program manager on the SQL Server Manageability team. For most of Katmai I led the team that designed and implemented PBM. "Lead" is kind of a funny word. No one on the PBM reported to me in the traditional HR sense. I simply made sure everyone was heading in the same direction and more often than not that it was the correct direction. I'm very proud of the feature we've produced. There's so much more we could've done and wanted to do but given the constraints placed upon us what we've done is awesome.

The ideas are swirling for the next few postings and I promise they'll start coming soon. Thanks for reading and don't forget to check back, better yet, hit the RSS link and subscribe - you won't regret it.

Cheers,

Dan