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Category: Powershell

Behind the Powershell Pipeline

Published 2022-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Hicks has some new content:

There is an intangible side to PowerShell that can help you understand why you should use PowerShell, in addition to the how. What does it mean to “manage at scale?” Why should you document your code, and what are some best practices? How can you take PowerShell profiles to the next level? These are some of the questions I want to tackle in a new newsletter I’m calling “Behind the PowerShell Pipeline.”

I want to take my years of PowerShell education experience and create genuine premium content. And I want to be able to afford to take the time to develop deep content. This new venture is available now on Substack at jeffhicks.substack.com. Premium content will only be available through a paid subscription. You are welcome to sign up for a free subscription, but that will limit your content.

I’m interested in success here, especially given how there is such a norm for giving away technical content. I like that ethos but also want to see some additional capability for premium content to be available, as I think that is good for the long-term health of technical content development.

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CIS Security Checks with dbachecks

Published 2022-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano shows how to perform a security check based on CIS requirements:

Well back at the end of 2019 I finished writing most of the checks related to the CIS Center for Internet Security requirements.  I have yet to write a blog post on how to use them.  So, well here is how to go about using them, it’s mostly code so should be pretty simple to implement.  I’ve mentioned this several times over the past year in presenting on dbatools.

So first you need to have dbachecks.  So, let’s start with the basics just in case you haven’t heard of dbachecks.  dbachecks is PowerShell module that checks the configuration of your SQL Server against various test have been predefined.  By default, it exports the data to JSON, and we will be opening PowerBI to display the data because why that is pretty.  So, go download you a copy of Power BI from the Microsoft website and let’s install dbachecks first.

Read on to see what you need, the steps for this process, and what the results look like.

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Adding Methods to a PSCustomObject

Published 2022-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain builds on a prior post:

In the previous installment of this series, I covered the various ways to create objects using the PSCustomObject. We saw how to create it using the New-Object cmdlet, then how to add your custom properties to it using the Add-Member cmdlet.

In this post we’ll learn how to add our own methods to our objects using script blocks. Before we go on, just a quick reminder on vocabulary.

Click through for that reminder, as well as implementation details.

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Finding your SQL Server Product Key

Published 2022-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

I share a tale of woe:

I was working on an upgrade recently, trying to move from SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server 2019. I wanted to perform an upgrade in-place on an Azure VM, but needed to get the product key. There are a few places where you can find Powershell functions to get this product key, with Ryan @ Ryadel’s post being the most well-known. That method covers versions from SQL Server 2005 through 2014 (if you follow the notes in the blog post), but breaks on 2016.

Click through for a script which works for SQL Server 2016 and later.

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Date Math in Powershell

Published 2022-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones adds 12 years in Powershell:

I saw a fun post on Twitter recently asking days until retirement. I wrote this code:

DECLARE @YearsToRetire INT = 11;
SELECT DATEDIFF (DAY, GETDATE (), (DATEADD (YEAR, @YearsToRetire, GETDATE ())));

I thought that wasn’t bad, but then I wondered, how would I do this in PowerShell? I knew there had to be a way, so I googled and ran into this article.

Normally I need to take off my shoes to add that many years.

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Creating Custom Objects with PSCustomObject

Published 2022-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain shows us one method of working with classes in Powershell:

For this post I’ll begin a series on the use of PSCustomObject. Prior to the addition of classes in PowerShell 5.0, this was the technique needed to create your own customized objects. It still has a lot of validity today though, as you can use these techniques to extend the objects other people defined, including those already built into PowerShell.

In addition, understanding the use of PSCustomObject will give you a better understanding of the way classes work.

Click through to see how you can create an object and assign properties to it, though methods will come in the next post.

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Executing sp_configure from Powershell

Published 2022-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Hill shows off another feature of dbatools:

If you’ve been responsible for an instance of SQL Server for any length of time you have probably dealt with sp_configure to change configuration settings at the server level. I have been using SQL Server since v6.5 and it was a thing then too. This is not a post about what the settings are or what they should be set to. There are plenty of resources out there for both. This is about how to see and set these options.

Click through for the process and what you can do with it.

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Discovering Pester Tags

Published 2022-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks has a two-parter on discovering Pester tags. Part one is Jeffrey’s take:

As I resolved at the end of last year, I am doing more with Pester in 2022. I’m getting a bit more comfortable with Pester 5 and as my tests grow in complexity I am embracing the use of tags. You can add tags to different Pester test elements. Then when you invoke a Pester test, you can filter and only run specific tests by their tag. As I was working, I realized it would be helpful to be able to identify all of the tags in a test script. After a bit of work, I came up with a PowerShell function.

Part two is a reader’s take:

Yesterday I shared some PowerShell code I wrote to discover tags in a Pester test. It works nicely and I have no reason to complain. But as usual, there is never simply one way to do something in PowerShell. I got a suggestion from @FrodeFlaten on Twitter on an approach using the new configuration object in Pester 5.2. I’ll readily admit that I am still getting up to speed on the latest version of Pester. That’s one of my goals for this year, so this was a great chance to learn something new.

Click through to see how both approaches work.

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