Grant, thank you for the review of SQLCop. One thing I wished you had mentioned was that we (at lessthandot.com) are willing to add additional checks to SQLCop. If there are any checks that you (or anyone else) thinks would be a worthy addition, please post it here: http://forum.lessthandot.com/viewforum.php?f=145

I didn't know that. That's great to know.

Why in the world enabling CLR is a smell or lapse in best practice???

Personally, I don't think it is, but a lot of DBAs do. Also some companies consider it a security risk. I understand why they have it, but I don't agree with it.

I'd be happy to be alerted if CLR has been enabled as our company policy dictates that we have it switched off in production servers as a security risk.

1. SQL Server DBAs should take example from every other vendor that has code running inside the engine (MySQL has C extensions...).
2. SQL Server DBAs should know they are still running and will be running in SQL Server 2012:
- to be deprecated but not yet, extended stored procedures
- stored procedures based on cursors and C/C++ code
3. .NET CLR is by those standards, a perfume!

Thanks! Good stuff as always!