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Category: Powershell

Error Handling in Powershell

Published 2025-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer catches ’em all:

Error handling is a critical aspect of writing robust scripts in any programming language. PowerShell provides a powerful structure for handling errors gracefully using try, catch, and finally blocks. These constructs allows us to manage exceptions and ensure that important cleanup actions are performed, even when errors occur. In this blog post, I will show you how to use try catch finally in PowerShell. Let’s jump in.

Click through to see how the logic works in Powershell, as well as how you can read the exception itself in the catch block.

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Finding Tables Matching a Pattern via dbatools

Published 2025-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret looks for old tables:

There are many reasons why you might end up with tables named something_old in your database. Perhaps this is part of your decommission strategy, to rename them to make sure they really aren’t in use. Or, it could be because you need to make schema changes, you can rename the current table and create a new table with the desired schema. But, the key to this blog post is when you then forget to come back and clean these tables up. We can easily find them with a dbatools command.

Read on to see how you can use dbatools cmdlets to find and remove these deprecated tables.

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Using the Entra ID Powershell Module

Published 2025-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer checks out a new module:

The new PowerShell Entra ID Module is a powerful tool designed to streamline the management and automation of Microsoft Entra resources. This module is part of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and offers a range of functionalities to enhance administrative tasks.

One of the key benefits of the Microsoft Entra PowerShell module is its focus on usability. Unlike MS Graph, the module is more user-friendly to operate. Let’s dive in.

Click through for a demonstration of what you can do with it.

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Working with Where-Object in Powershell

Published 2025-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Robbins performs some filtering:

PowerShell 3.0 introduced several notable improvements to its cmdlet library, with one of the most useful features in this release being the simplified syntax for the Where-Object cmdlet. This enhancement made filtering objects more efficient and user-friendly by introducing Property and Value parameters and a switch parameter for every comparison operator. This article explores how these changes work, their usefulness, and how to leverage them in your scripts.

Read on for a bit of history, as well as the options available to you now.

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Looping through bcp Calls in Powershell

Published 2025-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Schott needs to perform a series of bulk inserts:

Sometimes you need to extract a large number of tables into some other format. I’ve written about BCP earlier as a quick option to move data around, but what if you need a delimited text file or a way to repeat the calls without too much trouble across a set of servers? I had this come up recently and wrote up a combination of PowerShell, the sqlserver module, and the bcp.exe tool to allow for a variety of extract types and also, importantly, ensure that we get header data with those extracts in case we need them to pull in to another process. This is doable without the header piece, but many processes (and humans) expect some sort of header data. Thus – a slightly expanded process.

Click through for a script and an explanation of the process.

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Scraping SQL Server Version Updates

Published 2025-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards scrapes patch information:

(just for info, i’ve always refer to the SQL Server Version List (https://sqlserverbuilds.blogspot.com) as Blogspot for some reason)

Doesn’t take long, but it would be nice to not have to bother at all, and I don’t mean by moving everything to the cloud and let MS handle it either before anyone says it. 🙂

The details are just websites, so the html is just plain text, AND the awesome people who provide Blogspot also add the details to a publicly shared google doc, in multiple formats, legends.

So what can we do to make our lives even easier. How about downloading/scraping all of the details that you might ever need, and dropping them into tables somewhere? So when its in SQL, you can then choose to trigger off that however you like?

Read on to learn how.

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Finding Empty Attributes in Powershell

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer looks for what’s missing:

We are often looking for attributes, but what about the empty attributes? How can I find out if an attribute is empty? That is the focus of this article. I will show a practical example of how to find these empty attributes.

Let’s start with how to find attributes which are NOT empty. The following code retrieves all svchost process Attributes which have a value.

Read on for the pipeline to see which attributes have a value, followed by a similar pipeline to find missing values, as well as one practical use case for why you might use this.

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Azure Elastic Jobs to Run Powershell and T-SQL

Published 2025-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush kicks off a job:

I’ve covered how to create Elastic Jobs in the portal (this one is important to read if you aren’t familiar with elastic jobs already), with Terraform, and with Bicep. Now, I’ll cover how to create them and their associated objects with PowerShell. Don’t do this in prod to start. Always test in a lower environment first.

Click through for the process, as well as the script.

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Moving SQL Server Database Files

Published 2025-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea makes a move:

This post demos a script I put together to help move SQL Server database files to another drive and folder by generating PowerShell and T-SQL commands.

I’ve decided to make this script for situations where installing the dbatools PowerShell module wouldn’t be possible.
Otherwise, I highly recommend using dbatools’ Move-DbaDbFile command.

Click through for the script, and I second Vlad’s recommendation of dbatools for this kind of effort.

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