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Category: Powershell

Supporting Replication in dbatools

Published 2024-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret makes an announcement:

Replication, everyone loves to hate it, but it’s been our most requested feature as far as adding commands to dbatools. For ages we’ve said ‘sounds great’ and ‘we would love that’, but when we started looking into it the energy soon fizzled away, due to it’s dependency on RMO – Replication Management Objects, as opposed to SMO – SQL Server Management Objects, things weren’t as easy as we had hoped.

That said, it’s now there as of version 2.1.1. It supports snapshot, transactional, and merge replication. No peer-to-peer, but is anyone actually surprised at that?

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Checking SQL Server Connectivity with Powershell in Parallel

Published 2024-02-16 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards builds a script:

The chances are that you have other systems monitoring your SQL servers already, so this task isn’t required at all. However, sometimes a quick ‘knock on the door of SQL’ to confirm a response isn’t a bad thing as a sanity check.

So, building on that, we’re going to use the same technique to essentially perform a sweep of our estate (with a few bells and whistles added) to give us a colour coded quick view of service status like below, with a little bit of additional info.

Click through for the script and explanation.

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Identifying Old OLEDB and ODBC Drivers on Machines

Published 2024-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Lucas Kartawidjaja goes on a quest:

The vulnerabilities are affecting Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 and 18, as well as OLE DB Driver 18 and 19. For more information and also download location for the security update/ hotfix can be found on the following page: Update: Hotfixes released for ODBC and OLE DB drivers for SQL Server

We do an automated security scanning tool that would flag the systems (servers, desktops, latptops, etc.) that haven’t been patched. So we can quickly identify the systems that need to be patch and patched those systems quickly.

For this post, I was wondering if there is a quick way to identify Microsoft ODBC and OLE DB drivers that are being installed on the systems. 

Click through to see what Lucas came up with.

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Batching Data Copy Operations in SQL Server

Published 2024-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan performs a data migration:

The purpose of this post is to give you a skeleton of TSQL code on how to perform a copy of a large table (say from one database to another within the same SQL Server Instance) by breaking up the data into manageable chunks. I have blogged about how to break-up any Oracle or SQL Server table data into chunks in this blog post.

Read on to learn why you don’t want to perform the operation as a single query, and one alternative that’s available. The query is a good bit more complex, but that complexity is for a good cause.

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Parallelism Options in Powershell

Published 2024-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards enumerates the list:

This is one that I should have learnt way earlier than I actually did if i’m being completely honest. One of my colleagues wrote a cool function for multithreading, and although this isn’t it, it did made me look into how it all worked.

Some of the techniques can be quite complicated, especially for a DBA who’s not as experienced with Powershell yet (and a ForEach loop just works right?) so I thought i’d post about the simplier methods that can be employed, and tweaks to get most of the benefits, without the complexity.

So, lets jump straight into it.

Rod does focus on Powershell jobs and thread jobs, so check out how those work. A while back, I had a comment here talking about the various options though Rod has definitely put a lot more effort into this task.

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Handling Orphaned Database Files with dbatools

Published 2024-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards rounds up the orphans:

This may be an edge case issue, it may not. Or some may not know this is a potentially a thing. For any of the above questions, i’m not sure of the answer. I do know however, that it doesn’t involve morally suspicious fairy tales of any kind, flutes, or pastry products for that matter.

I also know that it’s something that could potentially be robbing disk space across SQL Estates so i’ll talk about it anyway and supply a simple way to fix this in one sweep using the magnificent DBATools.

Rod’s claim is no pastry products, but my counter-argument is that the command probably runs better if someone brings donuts in.

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Dynamic Parameters in Powershell

Published 2024-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Laerte Junior explains how dynamic parameters work in Powershell:

Have you ever been in a situation that you want to call a cmdlet or a function with a parameter that depends on a conditional criteria that is available as a list? In this article I will show a technique where you can use PowerShell Dynamic Parameters to assist the user with parameter values.

In the documentation of Dynamic Parameters found at about_Functions_Advanced_Parameters in get-help it is defined as “parameters of a cmdlet, function, or script that are available only under certain conditions.” And can be created so that appears “only when another parameter is used in the function command or when another parameter has a certain value.” So, we can say that PowerShell Dynamic Parameters are used when the result of a parameter depends on the previous parameter.

Click through for examples.

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Useful Operations in dbatools

Published 2024-01-04 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards shows off some nice functionality in dbatools:

I often build solutions around the dbatools functions, the below is just some of my Operational favourites. With some I’ve included the output pipe that I use most frequently, but obviously, you can view and use the output however you choose to. Clearly, DBATools has many functions to add/remove/update SQL as well, but i’m just folking on the ‘gets’ here.

Naturally, as mentioned…its powershell, you can programmatically use this for any of your automation needs. Marvellous.

The ever growing list of commands can be found here: command index – dbatools . This can prove daunting to new users of the toolset, so here’s a starter for 10.

Click through for those 10.

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Looping through SQL Server Instances in Powershell

Published 2023-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

Ajay Dwivedi has a script for us:

As a database administrator, often I have to fetch some metadata from all the SQLServers that we have. Other times, I have to execute some DDL or DML on all the servers.

In this blog and shared video, I show how to write a multiple server PowerShell script where server list source could range from raw text files to some inventory-based query result.

This is a serial operation, so you’re hitting one instance at a time. I’ve noticed that Powershell has about a half-dozen ways of performing parallel actions but they all seem to come with at least one fatal flaw.

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