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Category: Powershell

Useful Operations in dbatools

Published 2024-01-04 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards shows off some nice functionality in dbatools:

I often build solutions around the dbatools functions, the below is just some of my Operational favourites. With some I’ve included the output pipe that I use most frequently, but obviously, you can view and use the output however you choose to. Clearly, DBATools has many functions to add/remove/update SQL as well, but i’m just folking on the ‘gets’ here.

Naturally, as mentioned…its powershell, you can programmatically use this for any of your automation needs. Marvellous.

The ever growing list of commands can be found here: command index – dbatools . This can prove daunting to new users of the toolset, so here’s a starter for 10.

Click through for those 10.

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Looping through SQL Server Instances in Powershell

Published 2023-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

Ajay Dwivedi has a script for us:

As a database administrator, often I have to fetch some metadata from all the SQLServers that we have. Other times, I have to execute some DDL or DML on all the servers.

In this blog and shared video, I show how to write a multiple server PowerShell script where server list source could range from raw text files to some inventory-based query result.

This is a serial operation, so you’re hitting one instance at a time. I’ve noticed that Powershell has about a half-dozen ways of performing parallel actions but they all seem to come with at least one fatal flaw.

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Tokenizing SQL Queries

Published 2023-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Factor has a new script:

Imagine this: you have several directories full of SQL script files, and you need to know where a certain table is used. You’d rather like the context too, so you can check the whole SQL Expression and work out why it is running so slowly. Maybe, from that same daunting set of several directories, you need to search for a comment, either end of line, or block comment, perhaps structured. It could be that you just need to execute each query or statement in turn to check performance.

It’s not unusual to want to search just within strings. Although simple searches can be effective, you will at some point need a tool that is able to recognise and return a collection of strings representing the SQL code, divided up into the respective components of the SQL language.

For this article, we’ll use a PowerShell cmdlet, called Tokenize-SQLString, which is in my GitHub repository.

Read on for examples of how it works and the types of things you can do with it.

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Password Handling in Powershell Automation Scripts

Published 2023-12-18 by Kevin Feasel

Ajay Dwivedi gives us a tip:

I have been writing automations using PowerShell for many years now. One common issue I notice with people’s code is the improper handling of passwords. In this blog, I share how to set up a Credential Manager on a SQLServer and use the same for handling passwords in automation.

To setup Credential Manager, we need to download and execute the following steps using scripts from my Github repo SQLMonitor.

One point I’d like to clarify in Ajay’s scripts is that the passwords in the database aren’t hashed. Hashing is a one-way operation, so you’d never be able to decrypt it with a passphrase. The password is encrypted and the passphrase isn’t a salt—salts are a way of making a hash unique from the plaintext to prevent multiple users with the same plaintext password from having the same salt. Encryption instead of hashing is the correct answer here because you need the plaintext of the password to perform the automated operation.

As for ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE(), it’s okay if you’re running SQL Server 2017 or later. For 2016 and earlier, it uses Triple DES with 128 bit key length and that’s no good.

I’d also look into the Powershell SecretStore module and possibly integrate into an existing key vault if you have one.

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E-Mail Alerts when a Database is Offline

Published 2023-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Volker Bachmann gets an e-mail:

As the second article in the dbatools Quickies series, I would like to introduce another mail script that sends an email when databases on the servers examined are offline.

Unfortunately, it happens every now and then that databases are briefly taken offline but then forgotten. Here we receive weekly emails with all databases that are offline and where we can then follow up. If no database is offline, we will still receive an email with a short note.

Click through for the article in English and German, as well as a dbatools script and some additional remarks from Volker.

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Finding Disks Low on Space via dbatools

Published 2023-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Volker Bachmann has a script for us:

I will publish short PowerShell scripts with dbatools in loose order that will help with simple tasks or checks on multiple systems.

I would like to start with a script that lists hard drives that have less than a certain percentage of free space left, here 10%.
These are summarized in an email and sent as a list.

Click through for the script, as well as quick German and English explanations.

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Automated Alerts for Query Store Usage in Azure SQL DB

Published 2023-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz doesn’t want to run out of disk space:

In this article, we will introduce a PowerShell script that helps monitor the usage of Query Data Store (QDS) in SQL Server databases. The script automatically sends an email alert when the storage space used by the Query Data Store reaches or exceeds 80% of its maximum allocated space. This can be particularly useful for database administrators to proactively manage and optimize their database storage.

Before we dive into the details, it’s essential to note that the script provided is a recommendation and should be adapted according to your specific environment and requirements. The responsibility of ensuring its compatibility and the impact on your system lies solely with the user.

Click through for the script. A quick glance of the code makes me think it will also work with on-premises SQL Server.

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Skipping through Rows in a Large File with Powershell

Published 2023-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jay Robinson has a one-liner for us:

It came from working with enormous text files, and the gotchas that come with them. In this case, I had a 50gb data file that had something wrong with it, buried about 25% in. The file was being processed just fine, until it hit this unexpected data. And because the ETL app was written for performance first, there wasn’t a lot of data validation being done. So it’d just go boom when it hit that batch.

So what was wrong with the file? Well, in order to determine that, I had to see what was in that batch. But you can’t just open a 50gb file in Notepad. Yes, there are other ways to get around this, but here’s the one I chose:

Click through for Jay’s solution to the problem.

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