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Category: Powershell

Assuming a Role with AWS Powershell Tools

Published 2020-07-23 by Kevin Feasel

Sheldon Hull solves a problem:

I’ve had some issues in the past working with AWS.Tools PowerShell SDK and correctly assuming credentials.

By default, most of the time it was easier to use a dedicated IAM credential setup for the purpose.

However, as I’ve wanted to run some scripts across multiple accounts, the need to simplify by assuming a role has been more important.

It’s also a better practice than having to manage multiple key rotations in all accounts.

Read on to see how far Sheldon has been able to take this, but also how much more work is left to do.

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Finding and Downloading SQL Server Updates

Published 2020-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy combines dbatools and KBUpdate:

Another of Chrissy LeMaire’s (blog | twitter) projects is KBUpdate. Compared to dbatools it’s a pretty compact module, but it’s incredibly useful – it’ll seek out information about KB updates and even download them for you! She’s also rolled these functions into dbatools for convenience, so we don’t need to install or import that module separately.

Read on to see how Andy ties it all together.

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Secrets Management in Powershell Demos

Published 2020-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell is happy to stop using Import-Clixml:

I love notebooks and to show some people who had asked about storing secrets, I have created some. So, because I am efficient lazy I have embedded them here for you to see. You can find them in my Jupyter Notebook repository

https://beard.media/dotnetnotebooks

Rob has a follow-up on the topic:

Following on from my last post about the Secret Management module. I was asked another question.

> Can I use this to run applications as my admin account?

A user with a beard

Well, Rob has a notebook for that.

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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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