One of the best administrative features for DBAs is Policy-Based Management (PBM) that is introduced in SQL Server 2008. PBM has three components such as policy management, explicit administration, and evaluation modes that contain the concepts of targets, facets, and conditions.

The best practices are implemented as policies that are based on a predefined list of SQL Server recommendations as policy files. The evaluation of policies against a target set includes instances, databases, or database objects. The policies are used to determine whether there are potential issues in the database environment or instance meets best practices guidelines and recommendations.

Once a policy or multiple policies are implemented, they can be evaluated on the target system. The evaluation mode can be automated or performed manually by the DBA to reduce any manual intervention in administering and increase the ease of deployment.

In this recipe, we will go through...