PRO: Best Practices

PRO: Best Practices #

All features described on this page are part of the Professional Edition.

You can purchase licenses for the Professional Edition on the Portal: https://portal.sqldsc.com.

Domains #

If you work with multiple domains, go all in on that.

  • Have multiple DOMAIN.targets.hcl and NO targets.hcl
  • Have domain specific directories under nodes and NO .hcl files under the root of nodes

Tags #

Common uses for Tags include:

  • Seperate DEV from PROD
  • Group all nodes of an AG together. I like a tag for each availability group.
  • Group servers that are of specific versions. This can also be set in individual resources.
  • Group servers by language or time zone
  • Group servers by business unit
  • Group servers by data center

Tags can be used to group servers even if there aren’t settings in that tag – however it still needs an empty .hcl file. This can be used to stage large changes.

  • This can be done by using the --tag filter to only process certain servers. For example, you could edit defaults.hcl but then run with --tag alpha and it would only process for those servers assigned to tag alpha.
  • Or it could be done by changing the tag specific setting file. For example, you could update alpha.hcl and run for all servers. Then you could put those settings in defaults.hcl and remove them from alpha.hcl and run again.