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Category: Powershell

Parallelism in Powershell Workflows

Published 2024-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan shows one method for parallel execution in Powershell:

I’ve mentioned before that running Copy-DbaDatabase worked well in my experience, but the downside that I ran into was utilizing it for larger counts of databases. It should be no surprise that the more databases to copy, the longer the process takes to complete. I did some more research and came across using workflows along with the parallel keyword to speed up the copy process.

Let’s take a look at what a workflow is and how we can apply it to add parallelism to the database copy process.

I’ve previously covered options for parallelism, though apparently I was wrong about workflows being deprecated. Rod Edwards also has a list of options for doing things in parallel and does not include workflows, so you can get an idea of several of the options available to you.

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Finding Azure Region Pairs via Powershell

Published 2024-08-28 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Robbins is looking for a match:

In this article, you learn how to add a custom property to the Azure PowerShell Get-AzLocation cmdlet output to display the physical location for paired regions in Azure. This information isn’t available by default but can help you understand the resiliency and redundancy of your Azure resources like geo-redundant storage (GRS) and other Azure services that rely on Azure Storage for replication.

Read on to see how to do this.

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PowerShell Script to Move Azure SQL DB from General Purpose to Business Critical

Published 2024-08-20 by Kevin Feasel

Sakshi Gupta shares a script:

Recently, we faced a requirement to upgrade large number of Azure SQL databases from general-purpose to business-critical.

As you’re aware, this scaling-up operation can be executed via PowerShell, CLI, or the Azure portal and follow the guidance mentioned here – Failover groups overview & best practices – Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn

Given the need to perform this task across a large number of databases, individually running commands for each server is not practical. Hence, I have created a PowerShell script to facilitate such extensive migrations.

Click through for the scenarios Sakshi tested, some important considerations, and the script itself.

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Thoughts on Start-DbaMigration in dbatools

Published 2024-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan shares an experience:

It’s time to follow up on a post from a few months ago where I said I’d give my thoughts on Start-DbaMigration from dbatools after picking up more experience. Along with Start-DbaMigration I picked up some experience with Copy-DbaDatabase to migrate databases from one server to another. Below are some thoughts on the good and bad.

Read for Chad’s scenario and some of the good and the bad of Start-DbaMigration.

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Choosing between Add-Type and New-Object

Published 2024-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer contrasts two options in Powershell:

Predefined .NET classes: PowerShell makes certain predefined .NET classes directly available without you having to load them with “Add-Type”.

You can simply use “New-Object, to create instances of these classes. This includes many commonly used classes such as “System.String”, “System.DateTime”, “System.IO.FileInfo”

Read on for a few examples of this, as well as when you would want to use Add-Type instead.

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Comparing Configuration of Two SQL Server Instances

Published 2024-07-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan checks the labels on these bottles:

A lot of times, you have nearly identical database servers for an application running in Production, Test and Development but you may notice performance differences between them for the same data/queries that you could not attribute to any reason since CPU, Memory, Disk etc., may all be identical.

This is, strictly speaking, a comparison of configurations rather than data differences, indexing, and the like. Nonetheless, it’s useful to make this sort of comparison just to ensure that your instances have your desired state configuration.

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Using Powershell to Browse Azure Capabilities

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kay Sauter does some digging:

In a nutshell, Azure follows a structure called the Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Unfortunately, ARM is not human-readable, so you need to a tool to be efficient in using it. There are quite some tools available, and from Microsoft, there is Azure Bicep, Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. Since I have done some DBA stuff in the past, and I am a fan of dbatools (created by the team here), I find PowerShell the most convenient tool to use and suspect that many will see it the same way if they are using dbatools.

Click through for the post. As of right now, the images are broken, but if you open them in new tabs and remove the extraneous “browsing-azure-with-powershell/” in the URL, you’ll be able to see those images.

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Measure-Object in Powershell

Published 2024-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer counts the ways:

The Measure-Object cmdlet counts objects. But it can do even more. We can calculate the sum, the average and much more. In this blog post I show a few examples with Measure-Object. Let’s dive in.

It’s a fairly straightforward cmdlet but it has a lot of use, being a combination of something like wc in Linux as well as collecting basic statistics on objects.

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