Implementing New Manageability Features and Practices - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Administration - page 291

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In order to consider the PowerShell for SQL Server as a main scripting tool, there is a lot more
to be included by Microsoft. As of now, PowerShell support in SQL Server 2008 R2 is a good
starting point to manage administrative tasks in your platform and a number of cmdlets are
available in SQL Server PowerShell that are part of the basic PowerShell functionality. The
additional cmdlets for SQL Server PowerShell are as follows:
F Invoke-PolicyEvaluation for SQL Server Policy-Based Management.
F Invoke-SqlCmd to run regular TSQL statements that are supported by SQLCMD
utility.
F Encode-SqlName encodes SQL Server identifiers into a format that PowerShell
can use.
F Decode-SqlName helps to return the original SQL Server identifiers from a value
previously obtained by Encode-SqlName cmdlet .
F Convert-UrnToPath converts the SMO Uniform Resource Name to the SQL Server
provider path.
Implementing the SQL Server Best Practices
Analyzer
A best practice is a task or set of steps that best meet particular needs within the day-to-day
administrative tasks. As a DBA, you must evaluate the commonly accepted practices, best
practices and determine the best ones to apply to the environment.
To implement best practices, we should first evaluate and analyze if the existing environment
is managed efficiently according to the practices accepted in the industry. There are plenty of
tools available that enable the user to analyze the system on a particular set of best practices.
For SQL Server environments, Microsoft is offering two sets of tools that will help DBAs to
analyze the set of SQL Server instances and recommend best practices to implement. The
tools are Microsoft Codename Atlanta and SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer.
Microsoft Codename Atlanta (still in beta testing at the time of writing) is a secure cloud
service that proactively monitors the SQL Server deployment.
In this recipe , we will go through the process of implementing the SQL Server Best Practices
Analyzer diagnostic tool (SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA)) to evaluate the
existing SQL Server data platform.