A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jeffrey Hicks has a use for the Powershell ISE:
Way back before the days of PowerShell Core, or even VS Code for that matter, the PowerShell ISE was the center of my PowerShell world. I spent a lot of time finding ways to make it easier for me to use and to push it to its limits. Naturally, the PowerShell ISE doesn’t play much of a role for me these days. But that may not be true for you. In fact, one area where the ISE can be useful is with remote sessions.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedRobert Cain continues a series on fun with Powershell and strings:
Specifically, this can control the output when we embed a numeric value inside a string. Passing in special formatting instructions will make it easy to display values with commas, as currency, or even as hexidecimal.
For all of the examples, we’ll display the code, then under it the result of our code. In this article I’ll be using PowerShell Core, 7.1.3, and VSCode. The examples should work in PowerShell 5.1 in the PowerShell IDE, although they’ve not been tested there.
Robert has quite a few examples, so check them out.
Comments closedLee Markum needs to do log shipping in bulk:
I recently needed to configure log shipping for multiple databases at once as part of a migration project. I turned to PowerShell to do this.
But before we get to that part, this post assumes that you’ve done the upfront work to create shares for the backups to write to and for the backups to be copied to. This will involve providing the right permissions for the SQL Server service accounts involved in Log Shipping. If you are not familiar with this, that’s perfectly fine. Check out this article in MS Docs first.
Click through for the next steps in the process, including a well-timed Get-Help call.
Patrick Gruenauer takes us through null checking in Powershell:
Null is null. Dividing by zero is not allowed, say the mathematicians. What about null in PowerShell? Is null equal empty? What is $null? Why a method IsNullOrEmpty? In this blog post I will shed some on this and provide you with some examples to understand the differences between null and null or empty.
Read on for the full story.
Comments closedGarry Bargsley won’t let the cattle become pets:
As you sit and wonder about when the next Star Wars movie is going to come out, do you ever get the thought of “I wonder if all my SQL Servers are configured the same?”
Occasionally, I get a thought like that run through my mind. Or I might see something on Twitter or Blog post about something, and it sparks the question. Not about Star Wars, but my SQL Server environment.
Today something triggered me to confirm that all of my SQL Servers had the default backup compression setting set to enabled.
Garry mentions dbachecks at the end, and it’s a really good way of performing a fairly large number of such checks easily.
Comments closedJeffrey Hicks solves an interesting problem:
A few weeks ago my friend, Gladys Kravitz, was lamenting about a challenge related to filtering for unique objects. PowerShell has a Get-Unique cmdlet, and Select-Object has a -Unique parameter, but these options are limited. On one hand, I’d say most things we manage with PowerShell are guaranteed to be unique. Objects might have a GUID , ID, or SID, to guarantee uniqueness. But, and this is Gladys’ situation, sometimes the things we are managing come from an external source. Such as importing data from a CSV file. In this situation, it is definitely possible to have duplicate objects.
This turns out to be a bit harder than expected.
Comments closedRobert Cain shows off some features around strings in Powershell:
PowerShell has some of the best, most flexible string handling of any language I’ve used. In this post we’ll look at some string basics, then some of the features that make it special.
Note in these demos I’m using PowerShell Core 7.1.3 and VSCode. Everything here should also work in the PowerShell 5.1 and the PowerShell IDE.
Read on for types of strings, embedded quotations, string interpolation, and more.
Comments closedPhil Factor has a bit of Powershell for us:
How do you list all the objects and values within a PowerShell object, investigate an object or explore its structure? There must be a simple way. I used to use ConvertTo-JSON. This is fine up to a point but what if you just wish to search for strings or look for objects with a cartain name or value? What if you need their path so you can reference them? It isn’t plain-sailing. In the ISE, the intellisense will help you a lot but I want more and I want to do it in script rather than the IDE
Read on to check it out and get a copy of the cmdlet.
Comments closedPatrick Gruenauer shows off the Trim series of methods in Powershell:
In PowerShell it’s easy to manipulate strings, especially to cut off some characters from a string. These three methods are your friends when it comes to trimming: Trim, TrimStart and TrimEnd. In this blog post I will show you how to use PowerShell to manipulate strings and cut off something at the beginning and at the end. I will also try to give you some useful practical examples in hand to convince you that it’s worth to learn something about string manipulation. Let’s hop in.
Click through for examples of these three methods and how they do more than removing whitespace.
Comments closedChad Callihan shows us how to update the dbatools Powershell module:
The first sentence on the dbatools download page references the belief in releasing early and releasing often. While SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio may get a handful up dates every year, dbatools averages a few every month. Fortunately, staying up to date with dbatools is easily manageable as we’ll see below.
Read on to see how you can tell which version of the module you have and then how to update it.
Comments closed