PRO: Best Practices #
All features described in this page are part of the Professional Edition.
While in beta, you can enable the Professional Edition by creating an empty
key.xt
file next to thesqldsc.exe
file.The PRO edition will become a paid version. Until then, PRO features expire 90 days after the build date. Please see https://www.scalesql.com for updated builds or run
sqldsc update
.
Domains #
If you work with multiple domains, go all in on that.
- Have multiple
DOMAIN.targets.hcl
and NOtargets.hcl
- Have domain specific directories under
nodes
and NO.hcl
files under the root ofnodes
Roles #
Common uses for Roles include:
- Seperate DEV from PROD
- Group all nodes of an AG together
- Group servers that are of specific versions
- Group servers by language or time zone
- Group servers by business unit
Roles can be used to group servers even if there aren’t settings in that role – however it still needs an empty .hcl
file. This can be used to stage large changes.
- This can be done by using the
--role
filter to only process certain servers. For example, you could editdefaults.hcl
but then run with--role alpha
and it would only process for those servers assigned to rolealpha
. - Or it could be done by changing the role specific setting file. For example, you could update
alpha.hcl
and run for all servers. Then you could put those settings indefaults.hcl
and remove them fromalpha.hcl
and run again.