Collect and report on database-level extended properties for organizational metadata, and enable the new built-in automatic update feature for the DBA Dash service.

Database Level Extended Properties

Extended properties are a SQL Server feature that lets you attach arbitrary key-value metadata to database objects. At the database level they are commonly used to record organizational information — owner, team, cost centre, application name, business unit — that is invaluable when managing a large estate.

A new DatabaseExtendedProperties collection type has been added to DBA Dash. The collection runs at midnight by default, but the schedule can be adjusted — or the collection disabled entirely — in the service configuration tool.

The Database Extended Properties report is available in the Reports folder or under the Extended Properties node in the database-level tree. It shows all extended properties defined at the database level across your monitored instances, making it easy to query and compare organizational metadata in one place.

🙏 Thanks to goldenjacob for contributing this feature!

Automatic Updates (Beta)

The DBA Dash service can now check for and apply updates automatically on a defined cron schedule. Previously this required external tooling or scripting — it is now a first-class feature built directly into the service.

Setup

Open the service configuration tool and add UpgradeCheckCron set to a cron schedule of your choice. For example, to check at midnight every day:

"UpgradeCheckCron": "0 0 0 1/1 * ? *",

Ensure the service account is a member of the local administrators group or has permissions to start/stop the service and kill processes. The service needs to be stopped and any GUI instances terminated to avoid locked-file issues.

Automatic updates are disabled by default — no changes will happen until UpgradeCheckCron is configured.

Other improvements

See the 4.9.0 release notes for a full list of fixes and improvements.