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Category: Powershell

Minimum Permissions Required for Get-DbaDbUser

Published 2020-07-16 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill walks us through wants to figure out minimum permissions required for the Get-DbaDbUser cmdlet in dbatools:

I’m not going to sugarcoat things – the person that sent me the request has more access than they rightly need. The “public” access worker did not need any of that access so I wasn’t going to just give her the same level.

Plus, we’re supposed to be a workforce that has embraced the DevOps spirit and DevOps is nothing if it doesn’t include Security in it.

So, if I could find a way to give the user enough permission to run the command and not a lot more, then the happier I would be.

Shane takes us through the process so we don’t have to.

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Learning About Index Utilization with dbatools

Published 2020-07-16 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Miller takes us through a way to know your data:

You have many tables in your databases and you want to know how they are used. There are DMVs for index usage stats which will tell you about like sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats and querying them is insightful, but how do the stats change over time? These stats are reset when the instance is restarted and it is good to know that you have 2000 seeks and 500 scans of the index, but when did they happen? Was it on a common day? Common hour?

Ben has a way to help you figure that out.

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Truncating All Tables in a Database with Powershell

Published 2020-07-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret nukes the database from orbit, as it’s the only way we can be sure:

The most popular post on my blog so far was called ‘Disable all Triggers on a Database’ and this one is a good follow up from that post.

The scenario here is you need to remove all the data from the tables in your database. This could be as part of a refresh process, or perhaps to clear out test data that has been entered through an application.  Either way, you want to truncate all the tables in your database.

Click through for the code.

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Mounting a Disk Image in Powershell

Published 2020-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vamvas shows us how we can mount a disk image from ISO in Powershell:

I want to set up a script to Mount a Disk in an automated way utilising Powershell ? The image exists as an ISO on a network path and requires to be made available as a drive letter & path. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated drive letter – just the next letter after the highest. So for example , if I already have E:, F:,G:  than I want it to be set as I: 

For no extra charge, Jack also shows us how to dismount a disk image.

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Formatting TimeSpans in Powershell

Published 2020-06-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks shows how we can format TimeStamp objects:

This is pretty straight forward. Subtract the LastBootUpTime property from the current datetime to get a timespan object that shows how long this computer has been up and running. But…I want to get rid of the milliseconds value.  It’s irrelevant as far as I’m concerned and takes up space that I might want to use for another property.  I need to format that  value.

Click through for several methods.

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Using PowerShell to Build Excel Files

Published 2020-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Bronowski takes us through the ImportExcel Powershell module:

Using Add-PivotTable is straightforward (and from now on I am closing the whole Excel). Note the Activate switch at the end. When you open the Excel file the worksheet that was used in the command will show up first.

A long while ago, I had put together Powershell code to do this kind of work with Excel, but back then we needed to use COM. This looks much simpler.

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Azure Active Directory and the DatabricksPS Library

Published 2020-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl has updated the DatabricksPS library:

Databricks recently announced that it is now also supporting Azure Active Directory Authentication for the REST API which is now in public preview. This may not sound super exciting but is actually a very important feature when it comes to Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipelines in Azure DevOps or any other CI/CD tool. Previously, whenever you wanted to deploy content to a new Databricks workspace, you first needed to manually create a user-bound API access token. As you can imagine, manual steps are also bad for otherwise automated processes like a CI/CD pipeline. With Databricks REST API finally supporting Azure Active Directory Authentication of regular users and service principals, this last manual step is finally also gone!

If you do use Databricks and haven’t tried out DatabricksPS, I highly recommend it. I think it’s a much nicer experience than hitting the REST API directly, particularly because it deals with continuation tokens and making multiple calls to get your results.

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