Yesterday, I showed you how to install the Best Practices Analyzer and use it through the Baseline Configuration Analyzer.  Even after your servers are setup for best practices, it is good to run the BPA from time to time to look for changes, especially if you have more than one DBA working on your servers.  Here is a great example of its use:  we purchased a new piece of software that needed to setup its database during the install.  No problem, we do this quite often.  After the install, two databases were created.  Everything looked fine on the surface.

Not satisfied with everything looking fine, I ran the BPA and got the following results:

That’s right, the vendor tried to sneak in the Auto Shrink option.  Now I can quickly remedy this situation and sleep easy tonight knowing that my SQL Server is yet again unblemished, for the most part.

Enjoy!