A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
As cloud environments become more complex, securely managing secrets and credentials is increasingly critical. Azure KeyVault provides a secure way to store and access secrets in your Azure environment. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to create an Azure KeyVault, add secrets, and retrieve them using PowerShell.
Click through for the demonstration.
Comments closedLee Markum is looking for that lost shaker of SQL Agent jobs:
I’ve been doing migrations fairly continuously for the past 18 months. PowerShell has been my primary mechanism for many parts of the process, including copying jobs from the source SQL Server to the target. That has worked almost without incident each time. However, recently, an app team noticed that there were SQL Server Agent jobs missing on their new 2022 SQL Servers. Because the first couple of missing jobs also existed on their Development environment, they were able to recreate those jobs in production. They naturally expressed concern that other jobs may be missing.
Read on for Lee’s process, including the solution.
Comments closedGrant Fritchey provides an important public service announcement:
Please, let me reiterate: The only valid test of a backup is a restore.
THE
ONLY
VALID
TEST
OF
A
BACKUP
IS
A
RESTORE.
Grant is absolutely correct here. And do you know how hard it is to test a SQL Server backup? With dbatools, it’s this hard: Test-DbaLastBackup. That one cmdlet restores a backup (under a different name so it doesn’t clobber your existing database), runs DBCC CHECKDB against the restored data, drops the test database after the fact, and even allows you to do all of that against a different SQL Server instance.
Incidentally, my next YouTube series just happens to be around backup and restoration in SQL Server, so stay tuned if you’re interested.
Comments closedA couple weeks ago, DrData asked
With
SET STATISTICS IO ON, is there really no way to show the TOTALS at the bottom? There are some nice tools like StatisticsParser but it sure would be nice to see the totals of all values right at the bottom, especially when there are many tables.The task at hand in the office was a need to do the same thing, but with
SET STATISTICS TIME ON. So I got to thinking…I can PowerShell my way through this, right?
Andy, being The Man, shows us exactly how to do this.
Comments closedChad 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.
Comments closedMike Robbins is looking for a match:
In this article, you learn how to add a custom property to the Azure PowerShell
Get-AzLocationcmdlet 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.
Comments closedRecently, 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.
Comments closedChad 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.
Comments closedPatrick 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.
Justin Bird has a script for us:
I’ve been exploring Fabric APIs recently, and wanted to look into how to capture the tenant settings using simple APIs calls. This post will show how to use PowerShell to retrieve the tenant settings interactively.
Click through for the script and a breakdown of what it does and what it returns.
Comments closed