A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Kenneth Fisher lines ’em up and knocks ’em down:
In my last post I grabbed a file list but I really need it sorted alphabetically. Now, I’ve been a DBA my entire career and one of the things that gets hammered into you is that unless you specifically sort a list, there is no guarantee that that list will be sorted. So how do I sort my list?
To learn how and see a few examples of it in action, check out Kenneth’s post.
Comments closedJeffrey Hicks shows off some Powershell 7 functionality:
One of the topics we’ve discussed in the PowerShell Cmdlet Working Group is a request to make it easier to insert dynamic parameters. I am a bit torn on this. On one hand, I see the value in dynamic parameters. These are parameters that only exist if some condition is met, such as if the current location is in the Windows registry. The downside is that these parameters are difficult to discover and awkward to document. On top of that, the PowerShell code necessary to define a dynamic parameter is complicated and definitely not beginner-level. This is what I think the issue is really all about. So I decided to write my own tooling to make it easier to insert dynamic parameters.
Some of those examples go from “This looks reasonable” to “That’s a lot of code” pretty quickly. In fairness, though, this isn’t the type of thing you’ll write every day.
Comments closedRobert Cain explains what providers do in Powershell:
Providers are an interesting concept in PowerShell. A provider allows us to use a standard method to communicate with different areas of your computer using the same set of commands. For example, the file system is accessed using a provider. When you use
Get-ChildItemit goes through the file system provider to return a list of the files on your computer.We’ll take a deeper look in a moment, but first let me mention that 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, 7.1.5, and VSCode. The examples should work in PowerShell 5.1 in the PowerShell IDE, although they’ve not been tested there.
Click through for a listing of several providers and more detail on two of them.
Comments closedJeffrey Hicks makes Powershell more welcoming:
I realized it had been a while since I wrote a Friday Fun post. These posts are intended to demonstrate PowerShell in a fun and often non-practical way. The end result is generally irrelevant. The PowerShell scripting techniques and concepts I use are the real takeaways. The task is nothing more than a means to an end.
Today’s project is inspired by Linux. Specifically, the WSL Ubuntu installation I run in Windows Terminal. When I first launch it, I get a welcome screen like this.
I thought, why not do something similar for PowerShell?
Read on to see the result, which looks quite nice.
Comments closedEitan Blumin has a doozy of a short script:
Today, I’m sharing with you a cool Powershell script that basically implements the methodology necessary to move database files to a new location in AlwaysOn Availability Groups, without breaking HADR.
It’s based on a few very useful step-by-step guides on the topic such as this one and this one and this one. But it takes it a step further by being a single cohesive Powershell script that does everything end-to-end.
Well… Almost everything… The only thing it’s missing is somehow disabling any SQL Agent jobs that may be performing backups. I still haven’t figured out how to possibly automate such a thing, so you’d have to do that manually on your own.
Click through for instructions, notes, and warnings, as well as the script itself.
Comments closedKenneth Fisher shows us how Powershell implements subexpressions:
I’m working on a project right now where I want to add the date/time to the end of a filename. It didn’t take me long before I found a solution, and that solution lead me to subexpressions.
Click through for an example. This is indeed quite useful.
Comments closedJess Pomfret has a Powershell snippet for us:
This morning I was working on pulling together some information which included whether certain accounts were in the local administrator’s group on some remote servers. I had the perfect snippet saved in my code repo so I was quickly able to answer that question – and then I realised I should share that with you all.
Click through for the script.
Comments closedRobert Cain takes us through Markdown and snippets in Visual Studio Code:
Seriously though, I do find this documentation language very useful, and easy to use. With just a few commands I can produce a nicely formatted document that can be displayed in my code editor, as well as on platforms like GitHub. I’ve even begun authoring these blog posts in Markdown.
A big reason for me is the ability to integrate it into my projects. VSCode, as well as the full blow Visual Studio, support Markdown (with of course the proper extensions installed). When I create a new PowerShell project in VSCode, I can store the projects documentation in Markdown format right alongside the PowerShell code.
By the way, two VS Code extensions I can highly recommend for their Markdown support are Markdown All in One and markdownlint.
Comments closedShane O’Neill dives right into the deep end:
I once had the annoyingly complex T-SQL to change MS format time into a human-readable format memorised.
To be specific, that’s the nasty integer format used in SQL Agent jobs, a format which hasn’t made sense to use in decades (if it ever did).
Comments closedChad Baldwin goes the extra mile:
I’m excited that this will be my first time participating in a T-SQL Tuesday topic!
Most of my time is spent writing T-SQL, PowerShell and working in the PowerShell terminal, so that’s how I’ll split the post up.
I had to cut it short otherwise this post would be a mile long. If you’re interested in seeing more quick tricks, SQL Prompt snippets, etc, please leave a comment and let me know and I can do a Part 2 in the future.
Click through for a baker’s dozen plus a couple spares.
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