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Category: Powershell

Automating Azure SQL DB Maintenance Tasks

Published 2023-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano reminds us that we still need to administer Azure SQL DB databases:

I’ve been using Azure SQL Database for quite some while and have set up it in many various ways to run Ola’s Index Optimize and Statistics Updates on them.  All of these have seemed way too complicated probably because I was setting them up once, not again for several more months or a year.  Well with my new job, I have over 20 subscriptions with various Azure SQL Servers in them so it was time to streamline at least knowing what I was doing.  No matter what I googled on the Internet I never did find one source that walked me step by step on each thing I needed to know to set this up.  So hopefully this will cover everything.

Click through for the step-by-step process.

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Opening a Browser in Powershell

Published 2023-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain starts a process:

As part of my ArcaneBooks Project I described how to use the OpenLibrary Simple API to get book data.

In that post I also showed a way to bring up the webpage for an ISBN. I had a thought, why not build a function to add to the module to do that? This way a user would have an easy way to compare the output of the web API call to what the site holds.

In this post I’ll describe how to use the Start-Process cmdlet to open a target webpage.

Read on for the code to do this.

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Comparing Two Objects in Powershell

Published 2023-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer sees which of these is not like the others:

In this short blog post, I will show you how to compare two PowerShell objects to find differences between them. I will also give you an example on how to create objects for testing purposes. Let’s dive in.

If you’re familiar with the diff command, you’ll have some idea here. One advantage to Compare-Object, however, is that Powershell is dealing with objects rather than strings, allowing for more complex comparison scenarios assuming your objects are set up for it.

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Elapsed Timers in Powershell

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain keeps track of time:

I’m still working on my documentation for my ArcaneBooks project, but wanted to have something for you to read this week, so decided to show you how to create an elapsed timer in PowerShell.

It can be helpful to determine how long a process runs in PowerShell. You can use it to determine what parts of code may need to be optimized, or gather metrics around your functions.

This is the same stopwatch operation which is available in .NET generally, so if you’re using C# or F#, it’s the same basic process.

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Building an About Topic Help File in Powershell

Published 2023-05-09 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain teaches us about teaching others about something:

In my previous post, Fun With PowerShell – Authoring Help, I covered how to author comment based help for your functions.

In addition to help for your functions, it’s also possible to write about_ help. PowerShell itself contains many about topics for PowerShell itself.

These about topics are designed to provide further information for your users, information that may not fit into the confines of a functions help. These texts can be as long as you need.

I will say that the Powershell team nailed it with the way they implemented help.

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Adding Help to Your Powershell Code

Published 2023-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain helps those who help themselves:

Having good help is vital to the construction of a module. It explains not only how to use a function, but the purpose of the module and even more.

Naturally I’ve included good help text in the ArcaneBooks module, but as I was going over the construction of the ArcaneBooks module I realized I’d not written about how to write help in PowerShell. So in this post and the next I’ll address this very topic.

Read on for Robert’s thoughts on the topic, including standard ways to add content comments so Powershell’s built-in Get-Help cmdlet works for you.

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Documenting Group Policy Objects with Powershell

Published 2023-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer builds a report:

Active Directory Group Policies (GPO) enables you to control user and computer settings. It is important to document them. In this blog post I am going to show you two PowerShell commands which create a GPO HTML Report. Let’s dive in.

To store all GPO Settings from all GPOs in one file run this command. Don’t forget to provide your domain name and the path of the report file.

Click through for that code snippet, as well as another one which builds an HTML report for each GPO.

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Parsing Library of Congress Data with Powershell

Published 2023-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on books:

For this demo, we’ll be using an LCCN of 54-9698, Elements of radio servicing by William Marcus. When we call the web API URL in our web browser, we get the following data.

Click through for the results of the API call, which happen to be a blob of XML data. Robert shows how to get that data programmatically, then how to shred it into what he needs.

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Finding Special Characters in Powershell

Published 2023-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer looks for special characters:

Sometimes special characters are a nuisance. If you are trying to create some user accounts in on-premise or cloud environments, you should avoid special characters in usernames. In this blog post I will show how to find this special characters.

Click through for a regular expression-based approach, which also allows you to exclude special but not special enough characters.

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