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The SQL Notebook Experience, Featuring Powershell

Rob Sewell takes a break from book-writing and talks about using Powershell in SQL Notebooks:

Yes, it’s funny but also it carries a serious warning. Without understanding what it is doing, please don’t enable PowerShell to be run in a SQL Notebook that someone sent you in an email or you find on a GitHub. In the same way as you don’t open the word document attachment which will get a thousand million trillion pounddollars into your bank account or run code you copy from the internet on production without understanding what it does, this could be a very dangerous thing to do.

With that warning out of the way, there are loads of really useful and fantastic use cases for this. SQL Notebooks make great run-books or incident response recorders and PowerShell is an obvious tool for this. (If only we could save the PowerShell output in a SQL Notebook, this would be even better)

“It’s a bit hacky” is a generous statement, but it’s really cool that Rob figured out a way to do this. There is a Powershell kernel for Jupyter, but I’ve not had the best experience adding new kernels to Azure Data Studio (at least not F#’s kernel, which I tried).