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Category: Powershell

Refresh a Dataset when Dataflow Refresh Completes

Published 2020-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche points out an API update:

Back in August I highlighted the new dataflows PowerShell script repo on GitHub. These scripts provide an accelerated starting point to working with the dataflows REST APIs and to automate common dataflows tasks.

This week the dataflows team has released two new REST APIs for managing dataflows transactions (think “refresh”) and a new parameterized PowerShell script to make using the APIs easier.

Read on to see how you can use these new APIs to trigger a dataset refresh once a dataflow refresh has completed.

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Color Combination Testing in Powershell

Published 2020-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks has a script to test out color combinations in Powershell:

A lot of my PowerShell work lately has involved color. I find myself using ANSI escape sequences quite often. I’m also playing with different color schemes in Windows Terminal. And I still on occasion find myself using Write-Host to display colorized messages. What has gotten trickier is that Windows Terminal schemes can redefine colors. What I am used to as Green may not actually be Green. I polished up a simple script, to display all possible combinations for the console colors.

Read on for the script, as well as some oddities with Windows Terminal.

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Learn Powershell with PSKoans

Published 2020-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski shows off PSKoans:

Recently I have got a question about resources to learn PowerShell. There is plenty out there in the wild, but I came across an interesting module I would like to write today – PSKoans.

I’m a big fan of the koan strategy of learning. It ramps you up slowly and gives you plenty of code to help understand syntax and flow. The F# koans are fantastic, as are Python’s.

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Using Pester to Test Cluster Resource Owners

Published 2020-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret has a check for who owns specific failover cluster resources:

If we are going to test that we’re in our expected configuration, we need to record what that configuration looks like.  I have a hard coded list of cluster names. However, you could easily pull them from a text file, or a database.  Once we have the list of clusters we can use Get-ClusterGroup to determine the cluster roles and their current owners.

To persist this owner information I’m using ConvertTo-Json and then outputting it to a file. This creates a file that can easily be read back into PowerShell as an object using ConvertFrom-Json.

It’s also probably worth mentioning that this ideal configuration can be stored in source control. That’ll keep the file safe and you can easily keep track of any changes that are made to it.

Read on for the full set of steps.

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Finding Loops in an Active Directory Hierarchy

Published 2020-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan builds a recursive solution to an interesting problem:

Here is the example he gave me:

I am looking for a way to detect recursion loops in a specified AD Group.  Take this example of groups and members. I started with Group1, and found Group2, with group member Group2. Group2 has a group member Group3. Enumerating Group3 finds Group1, and loop!

He also said: Some groups are nested many levels down, and a single top level group can have more than one recursive loop. The script should be able to not only identify Group1>Group3>Group1, but also Group1>Group8>Group5>Group15>Group1.

This is a good use case for recursion.

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Working with Keys and Certificates using dbatools

Published 2020-09-18 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski concludes a series on using dbatools to replace SQL Server Management Studio functionality:

There are multiple security-related objects that are not easily accessible via SQL Server Management Studio. The first one would be Service Master Key, if exists, can be seen under the master database. Luckily, dbatools can help us to take a backup.

Click through for the details. If you’ve missed any of Mikey’s posts, here is the full list of posts.

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Automating Power BI Deployments

Published 2020-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee has started a series on automating Power BI deployments. The first post covers some of the basics of Powershell:

The console works great when you’re executing single commands, but not when you’re developing entire scripts. The ISE has a built-in console and has everything you need from a development perspective.

I have recently started using Visual Studio Code to develop my PowerShell scripts, and it works pretty well and feels like a more complete development tool. You would also need to use VS Code if you want to install and use PowerShell 7, because it doesn’t work with the ISE. I don’t want to get too lengthy here, so if you’re interested in using VS Code you can read all about it here.

Click through for the entire article.

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Starting and Stopping Services Things with dbatools

Published 2020-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski continues a series on dbatools:

OK, let’s start. While doing some maintenance tasks there is a need to start/stop/restart SQL Services. Using SQL Server Configuration Manager is one way or even straight from SSMS, however, working with multiple instances is easier with dbatools.

Mikey covers services, SQL Agent jobs, endpoints, traces, and Extended Events sessions, so check it out.

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Automating Collection of SSIS Failure Data

Published 2020-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell has a love for automation:

I have tried my best at all times to follow this advice in the last decade and pretty much I am happy that I have managed it.

– I use PowerShell (a lot!) to automate all sorts of routine tasks including migrating this blog
– I use Jupyter Notebooks to enable myself and others to automate Run Books, Training, Documentation, Demonstrations, Incident Response. You can find my notebooks here
– I use Azure DevOps to automate infrastructure creation and changes with terraform and delivery of changes to code as well as unit testing.
– I use GitHub actions to create this blog, publish the ADSNotebook module
– I use Chocolatey to install and update software
– I have used Desired State Configuration to ensure that infrastructure is as it is expected to be

At every point I am looking for a means to automate the thing that I am doing because it is almost guaranteed that there will be a time in the future after you have done a thing that there will be a need to do it again or to do it slightly differently.

Click through to see what Rob has for us in the way of collecting SSIS log data after job failures.

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