A developer asked me if he could install “microsoft.office.interop.excel.dll” on a Production database server. This dll is part of the Microsoft Excel 11.0 Object Library.

This would satisfy his requirement to run a transformation on an Excel file, as part of a SSIS job.

The database server policy is to not install extra libraries unless they are part of a standardised database server build.

One of the main reasons for standardising all builds is to improve management. Including rebuilds and Disaster Recover situations.

A sample of the standard builds for database servers include:

Tivoli Endpoint

Virus Scan

Resource Kit

Tivoli Storage Mgr

Tivoli Workload Scheduler

Tivoli Data Protection

SQL Management Studio

OSQL & sqlcmd

BCP

Prior client version compatibility with 2005 release of RDBMS (8.0)

SQL Server binaries

What I’d like to know is how you manage requests for ad-hoc libraries? Do you have a policy? If you do allow, then what sort of documentation standards do you maintain?

Republished from http://www.sqlserver-dba.com.