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What Is a CMDB?

A full-blown Configuration Management DataBase stores information about your environment, but it's more than just an asset database. It stores relationships between IT assets (servers, applications, networks) and business functions. For a more detailed definition, check out the Wikipedia article about CMDBs.

For database administrators, however, we're going to focus on a small subset of what an enterprise-wide CMDB might perform. We're going to store:

• Servers
• Databases
• Applications
• Historical snapshots of the above

Building a CMDB

We're going to build a CMDB using SQL Server's Central Management Server and freely available tools. The techniques in these articles will require two things: a SQL Server 2008 instance, and the willingness to add linked servers from all of your instances to that one SQL Server 2008 instance. Don't worry - it won't require a lot of work, and we'll show you how to do it programatically.

These articles explain how. Read them in order to build, populate and extend the CMDB:

• CMDB Schema Scripts
• CMDB Servers Population Scripts
• CMDB Databases Population Scripts
• CMDB Schema Extension
• CMDB Simple Discovery Queries
• CMDB Advanced Discovery Queries

Related Reading About CMDBs

To learn more about CMDBs, here's a few tutorial links:

• Central Management Server - our CMDB tutorials rely on using SQL Server 2008's new Central Management Server feature.
• Quest webcast on building a SQL Server CMDB