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Analyze Your SQL Server Implementations
Analyze your databases and generate reports about their implementation and use with the Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer.
by Patrick Meader
Tech•Ed, May 25, 2004
As announced today at Tech•Ed, you can now download a SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer from Microsoft's Web site at www.microsoft.com/sql. The analyzer is a standalone tool for analyzing your database implementations, a complement to the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. The SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer lets you check for many common design, development, and maintenance issues, from the ill-advised practice of storing log files and data files on the same disk to whether databases are being backed up often enough to meet your company's standards and practices.
Key features include the ability to generate reports on the databases you scan. The reports are generated in a Reporting Services–compatible format, so you can also send out automated nastygrams to people who oversee databases that aren't compliant with your company's best practices.
The analyzer checks more than your current implementation: It also checks how compatible your existing SQL Server database implementation is with SQL Server 2005 (code-named Yukon). For example, the analyzer will check your existing databases against features that have changed or are no longer supported in SQL Server 2005. The analyzer is rules-based, so Microsoft can update the tool as best practices change or as changes occur in SQL Server 2005 as the product nears release.
Separately, Microsoft also announced that SQL Server 2005 will have native support for data encryption for the first time. The encryption in SQL Server 2005 is user-specific, and it will support a handful of different encryption methods, including certificates. Microsoft's Tom Rizzo, director of SQL Server product management, notes that "the level of encryption can be broad or highly granular, covering as much as the entire database or as little as a single cell in the database." When you make your connection to SQL Server, you will be able to select new commands from the database that let you decrypt the data based on how it was encrypted in the first place.
Microsoft also announced that SQL Server will be compatible with the U.S. government Common Criteria certification (formerly known as C2 security, which has been deprecated). Microsoft is still in the process of certifying SQL Server 2005, but says this will be in place by the time the tool ships.
About the Author
Patrick Meader is the editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine and Windows Server System Magazine.
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