Many database administrative tasks are essentially the same across all the databases and all the servers. These include such tasks as monitoring, capacity planning, policy enforcement, best practice checking, and so on. Many more database administrative tasks are at an aggregate level, requiring data from individual databases across your enterprise. These include various reporting tasks, and investigative tasks that may need to check all or a subset of your databases or servers across the enterprise.

Having a central repository of your databases and servers is absolutely necessary for you to accomplish these tasks in a professional manner. This presentation discusses what you should have in such a repository, how you may pull data together into the repository and keep it up to date, and what problems and tasks you can effectively manage with such a repository.

Linchi Shea has been working with SQL Server since version 4.21a. He works in the financial services sector in and around New York City. Linchi is passionate about creating robust and automated infrastructures for managing SQL Server in an enterprise environment, and enjoys troubleshooting database performance issues. He has written many tools and utilities to simplify deploying, operating, testing, and analyzing SQL Server. You can find him blogging about SQL Server enterprise issues at www.sqlblog.com. Linchi is a co-founder and co-lead of the NYC SQL Server users group, and has been a Microsoft MVP since 2002.