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Category: Powershell

The Purpose of Powershell Providers

Published 2021-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain explains what providers do in Powershell:

Providers are an interesting concept in PowerShell. A provider allows us to use a standard method to communicate with different areas of your computer using the same set of commands. For example, the file system is accessed using a provider. When you use Get-ChildItem it goes through the file system provider to return a list of the files on your computer.

We’ll take a deeper look in a moment, but first let me mention that for all of the examples we’ll display the code, then under it the result of our code. In this article I’ll be using PowerShell Core, 7.1.5, and VSCode. The examples should work in PowerShell 5.1 in the PowerShell IDE, although they’ve not been tested there.

Click through for a listing of several providers and more detail on two of them.

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Building a Welcome Prompt for Powershell

Published 2021-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks makes Powershell more welcoming:

I realized it had been a while since I wrote a Friday Fun post. These posts are intended to demonstrate PowerShell in a fun and often non-practical way. The end result is generally irrelevant. The PowerShell scripting techniques and concepts I use are the real takeaways. The task is nothing more than a means to an end.

Today’s project is inspired by Linux. Specifically, the WSL Ubuntu installation I run in Windows Terminal. When I first launch it, I get a welcome screen like this.

I thought, why not do something similar for PowerShell?

Read on to see the result, which looks quite nice.

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Moving Files Associated with Availability Groups

Published 2021-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin has a doozy of a short script:

Today, I’m sharing with you a cool Powershell script that basically implements the methodology necessary to move database files to a new location in AlwaysOn Availability Groups, without breaking HADR.

It’s based on a few very useful step-by-step guides on the topic such as this one and this one and this one. But it takes it a step further by being a single cohesive Powershell script that does everything end-to-end.

Well… Almost everything… The only thing it’s missing is somehow disabling any SQL Agent jobs that may be performing backups. I still haven’t figured out how to possibly automate such a thing, so you’d have to do that manually on your own.

Click through for instructions, notes, and warnings, as well as the script itself.

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Visual Studio Code, Markdown, and Snippets

Published 2021-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain takes us through Markdown and snippets in Visual Studio Code:

Seriously though, I do find this documentation language very useful, and easy to use. With just a few commands I can produce a nicely formatted document that can be displayed in my code editor, as well as on platforms like GitHub. I’ve even begun authoring these blog posts in Markdown.

A big reason for me is the ability to integrate it into my projects. VSCode, as well as the full blow Visual Studio, support Markdown (with of course the proper extensions installed). When I create a new PowerShell project in VSCode, I can store the projects documentation in Markdown format right alongside the PowerShell code.

By the way, two VS Code extensions I can highly recommend for their Markdown support are Markdown All in One and markdownlint.

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15 Short Code Snippets

Published 2021-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Baldwin goes the extra mile:

I’m excited that this will be my first time participating in a T-SQL Tuesday topic!

Most of my time is spent writing T-SQL, PowerShell and working in the PowerShell terminal, so that’s how I’ll split the post up.

I had to cut it short otherwise this post would be a mile long. If you’re interested in seeing more quick tricks, SQL Prompt snippets, etc, please leave a comment and let me know and I can do a Part 2 in the future.

Click through for a baker’s dozen plus a couple spares.

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Repurposing Helpful Scripts

Published 2021-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri re-shares some helpful scripts:

For the past couple of years as a DBA, I migrated several databases and used many handy scripts that helped me made my work easier. These scripts may be simple but if you have a migration project involving several SQL Servers with some hundreds of databases, test and production database migrations becomes tedious. I would like to share some of then here which you might already known them very well.

Click through for three scripts.

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