We’ve been running the Enterprise Policy Management tools available from Codeplex for a few months now (Thanks to Buck Woody’s (blog | twitter) session at the PASS Summit). They’re honestly great. It’s a fantastic way to use Policy Based Management on 2000 and 2005 servers. We did hit some issues with timeouts and looking at the script, it made a call to invoke-sqlcmd, but didn’t pass the -querytimeout value. That means it default to 30 seconds and the import to database process was taking more than a minute for some of our queries. I did a little looking around and decided to just disable the timeout by passing a value of zero (0). But, I still got timeouts. Finally, after a bit of searching around, I found a closed (because it was posted in the wrong place) Connect item. It’s pretty simple to test. If you want to see a good run, do this:

Invoke-Sqlcmd “waitfor delay ‘00:00:29′” -Database master -ServerInstance SomeServer -Querytimeout 0

It’ll work fine. Change it to this:

Invoke-Sqlcmd “waitfor delay ‘00:00:31′” -Database master -ServerInstance SomeServer -Querytimeout 0

You’ll get a timeout. I don’t know if this is a bug or by design, but it’s a bit of a pain that you can’t simply bypass the timeout. There is a max value (a huge max value) 65535, but what happens if I run a sql command that runs longer than that?. Please go and vote on the new Connect item.