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Category: Powershell

Console Coloration with Powershell

Published 2020-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks takes us through color changes with Powershell:

I readily admit that I spend a great deal of my day at a PowerShell prompt. My day is very much run from the command-line, and has been for quite some time. This used to be a drab, gray existence. But I’ve been finding ways to liven things up. Here’s one way.

The PSScriptTools module includes a number of custom format files with alternate views. You need to make sure the module is imported before you can use any of them.

It’s interesting just how much of a quality of life improvement file type coloration is. I’ll go out of my way to use colorized shells with bash, as well as pretty much any IDE and even Notepad++.

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Improving Performance Counters with Powershell

Published 2020-11-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks has an improvement to Get-Counter in Powershell:

I wanted to tell you about another addition to the latest release of the PSScriptTools module. This is something I’ve written about before but I decided to add the function to the module. I hope you find it a much easier way to work with performance counters. And it works in Windows PowerShell and PowerShell 7.x.

Click through to see what has changed.

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Deploy Reporting Services Projects with Powershell

Published 2020-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson has a pair of new Powershell cmdlets:

I built two new PowerShell commands to deploy SSRS projects, and they have finally been merged into the ReportingServicesTools module. The commands are Get-RsDeploymentConfig & Publish-RsProject. While the Write-RsFolderContent command did already exist, and is very useful, it does not support deploying the objects in your SSRS Project to multiple different folders in your report server. These two new commands can handle deployment to multiple folders.

Click through for details on each.

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Exporting SQL Server Configurations

Published 2020-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley shows how you can export configuration settings for your SQL Server instances:

Have you ever deleted a login by mistake from a hastily typed TSQL script or dropped a list of logins because the “Business” said they are not used anymore? Have you ever made a change to a SQL Server Agent job and then it failed on the next execution. What about that time you changed the Database Mail profile on all of your servers and left your personal account in the script instead of the DBA distribution list.

While each of these examples is not life-threatening, they will strike fear in you depending on how prepared you are to recover the items in question.

This is the type of thing you’d want to store in source control, too. That way, you have a record of changes over time.

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Auto-Checking Azure Data Factory Setup

Published 2020-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew is at it again:

Building on the work done and detailed in my previous blog post (Best Practices for Implementing Azure Data Factory) I was tasked by my delightful boss to turn this content into a simple check list of what/why that others could use…. I slightly reluctantly did so. However, I wanted to do something better than simply transcribe the previous blog post into a check list. I therefore decided to breakout the Shell of Power and attempt to automate said check list.

Sure, a check list could be picked up and used by anyone – with answers manually provided by the person doing the inspection of a given ADF resource. But what if there was a way to have the results given to you a plate and inferring things that aren’t always easy to spot via the Data Factory UI.

Paul uses an ARM template rather than hitting your Data Factory directly, so there’s a little bit more work for you the user, but Paul explains why it’s both necessary and proper.

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Triggering a Refresh with Power BI’s API

Published 2020-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee continues a series on automating Power BI deployments:

At times you may want to refresh a Power BI dataset from outside the portal, either on-demand or as part of another process (think DevOps for instance). In those cases the API provides the ideal mechanism to do so. Just remember that you are still limited to 8 refreshes a day if you don’t have a Premium workspace, and using this method will not work beyond the number of allowed refreshes. You also cannot count on the API to return a useful error message in that case.

Read on to see how.

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PIVOT in Powershell

Published 2020-10-29 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill succumbs to peer pressure:

I can’t very well give out to people for not doing the right thing first time, even if it’s more difficult, if I don’t do the right thing myself!

As Kevin mentioned, once the data was in a proper format, a format designed for SQL, the calculations were trivial.

However, outputting the results in the same way in PowerShell required a way to pivot results in PowerShell. Thanks to some heavy lifting from Joel Sallow ( Blog | Twitter ), I now know how to pivot in PowerShell!

Here’s hoping that this post will help explain it for you also.

It’s interesting to see how much more difficult it is to turn a “tall” data set into a “long” data set in Powershell. It’s not that many lines of code once you know how to do it, but getting there is a challenge.

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Updating a Power BI Refresh Schedule

Published 2020-10-28 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee continues a series on automating Power BI deployments:

There’s a few things you need to pay close attention to when setting the refresh schedule via the API:

– Unless you’re setting the refresh schedule for a Premium workspace, you can only refresh a dataset up to 8 times a day. We’re only going to set it to update once a day here, but keep this in mind if you’re planning to adjust the API call to refresh multiple times a day.

– The name of the time zone you provide has to match exactly with the names (middle column) in this reference: Microsoft Time Zone Index

– The refresh time has to be in the format hh:mm, and similar to the options in the Power BI portal you can only refresh on the hour or half-hour.

Read on to see how it works and the API call to make.

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