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Category: Powershell

Extracting Refresh Metrics for a Power BI Workspace

Published 2021-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld wants to pull some metrics:

In the Power BI service, you can easily look at refresh times for an individual dataset or dataflow. There are many different reasons why these metrics are important to you as a dataset or dataflow owner. For example, you may bump into refresh time-outs or unfortunate errors. There are many good reasons to think about why you want to have more insights in your refresh metrics.

Having that said, it can be a pain to look at these metrics every day. Power BI already offers a way to send automatic notification in case of a refresh failure. Though, I would personally prefer to have more insights in all my refresh metrics, whether they are failing or succeeding.

In this blog I want to share a way how you can export all refresh metrics for your datasets and dataflows using a PowerShell script.

Click through to see how and to get a copy of the script.

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Adjusting Database Settings with Powershell

Published 2021-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

Eric Cobb takes a look at some nice functionality in dbatools:

There may be times that you want to ensure certain settings are applied to a database, or multiple databases. For example, if you restore a Production database to a QA environment, you may need to change the Recovery Model. Or if you’re migrating databases to a new SQL Server version you want to make sure to update the Compatibility Level. With dbatools this is really, really easy. Here are some examples:

Read on for examples around setting the database owner, changing the compatibility level, and setting the recovery model.

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Incremental Backoff with Powershell

Published 2021-01-04 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill implements a linear backoff strategy:

Pushups are hard! Even when I’m not trying to rep out as many as I can, they still take a toll on the body. Soon a five-minute break is not enough, and I’m taking longer and longer rests.

Fine, if that’s the way we’re going to do this, then I’m going to go with the flow.

I can confirm that pushups are hard. Also, click through for a link to the backoff script.

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Powershell Quick Hits

Published 2021-01-04 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret shares a few Powershell tips:

My goal was to gain more stars than last year, which I succeeded at. I only got 6 total stars last year. Now my goal for next year will be to beat this year’s performance.  I did learn several neat things while working on these puzzles and those I thought were worth sharing.

Read on for those things.

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Working with Excel in Powershell

Published 2020-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski has a festive post:

This blog post is part of the Festive Tech Calendar.

If you want to practice the whole thing I have prepared an interactive notebook for you that could be opened with Azure Data Studio for example (link to the notebook). For more things about the PowerShell module check this post out.

I would like to invite you to the world of magic!

Click through for an image-rich and extremely detailed post.

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Using Powershell to Automate Azure Databricks Processes

Published 2020-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun continues a series on Databricks:

Yesterday we looked into bringing the capabilities of Databricks closer to your client machine. And making that coding, data wrangling and data science little bit more convenient.

Today we will look into deploying Databricks workspace using Powershell.

By the way, if Powershell automation of Databricks tasks is of interest to you, also check out Gerhard Brueckl’s extension module for much more along those lines.

Also, I give Tomaz a lot of credit: most Advent calendars stop at 24 days but Tomaz laughs off such limitations.

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Working with SQL Server Certificates in Powershell

Published 2020-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Schott walks us through the process of certificate maintenance:

I recently had a need to add certificates to SQL Servers throughout an organization. There were quite a few servers to update and the certificates would need to be generated using a given format. This would include some descriptors for the names, IPv4 address, and ensuring that SQL Server would see the certificate when finished.

I realized this would need some sort of script so reached for PowerShell and the dbatools module. There’s a function in dbatools that supports setting the SQL Server Certificate and I knew that would be useful. But first, I had to generate the certificate itself. I read up on this in PowerShell and there’s no “easy” button for creating a certificate at this time, especially not when you need to add extra properties.  Posts such as this one helped me get started. It works by creating an INF file, then shelling out to “certreq.exe” to generate the CSR file needed to obtain a certificate from a certificate authority. We had need to use the DNS name, the FQDN, and the IPv4 address as part of our certificate request, so I had to adjust my code to handle that.

Click through to see how.

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Creating Property Names in Powershell

Published 2020-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks shares some Powershell API design tips:

When you build a PowerShell tool, you want the output to be easy to use. To me, this means having clearly defined property names. Dave has a command in the module to get a Twitter user account. Here’s what it currently writes to the pipeline.

For the sake of demonstration, assume that the Get-TwitterUser command is your code that is invoking a REST API and returning a custom object to the pipeline.

The property names are mostly clear, although not very PowerShell friendly. How many native PowerShell commands do you run that have properties that look like this? Let’s fix this.

Read on to see those properties and how you can make them more Powershell-friendly.

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Powershell Splatting vs Backticks

Published 2020-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

John McCormack on backticks:

My code was full of backticks. You could say I was daft about backticks. I loved them and thought they made my PowerShell code readable because they stopped the lines from running off the monitor. Someone asked me why I don’t use PowerShell splatting? “Whatting” I asked? I had never heard of splatting.

Click through to learn more.

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