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Category: Powershell

.NET and Powershell 7 Notebooks

Published 2020-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell forwards on some exciting news:

A notebook experience for PowerShell 7 that sounds amazing. This will enable a true cross-platform PowerShell Notebook experience which is lacking from the Python version as it uses Windows PowerShell on Windows and PowerShell Core on other OS’s

The first thing I asked was – Will this come to Azure Data Studio. I got an immediate response from Sydney Smith PowerShell Program Manager saying it is on the roadmap

Two notes of importance. First, these are kernels for Jupyter Notebooks and not Azure Data Studio or VS Code (yet). Second, Rob buried the lede on the most important language in there: F#. You can also read the full announcement from Maria Naggaga, to which Rob linked.

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Powershell Runspaces

Published 2020-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson has a new blog and an itch to explain the notion of runspaces in Powershell:

So I have a problem with some of the posts I’ve read about runspaces. It all comes down to a small detail that I think makes a big difference in your understanding of them.

$Runspace = ::Create()

This code looks innocent. What does it do? You’d probably think it’s creating a new runspace, but it’s not. This code is instead creating a fresh instance of PowerShell. If you run this code and run Get-Runspace you’ll see there is still just one listed, the one attached to your current session. So what is this instance we just created?

Click through for an example and a step-by-step breakout of that example.

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Finding SMO Objects with Specific Properties

Published 2020-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Sander Stad wants to find a specific subset of SMO objects:

In some situations I want to search through lots of objects to look for certain properties in SMO (SQL Server Management Objects)

This is also the case in this situation. I wanted to know all the different objects that had a property called “Schema”.

But what to do with all those different properties and methods we could look up. I mean, there are hundreds of objects in there and each of them have many methods and properties.

Click through for the Powershell script.

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Showing a Calendar in your Powershell Prompt

Published 2020-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks has fun with calendars in Powershell:

Some of you may be aware of my PSCalendar module which you can install from the PowerShell Gallery. The module contains commands that you can use to display a console-based calendar.  The calendar commands let you specify days to highlight. These might be days with special events or appointments. I typically use the Show-Calendar command as it writes to the host and colorizes output.

This command also has a parameter that lets you specify a position in your console. In other words, you can tell PowerShell where to display the calendar. I recently fixed a bug with the command that was producing less than optimal results. Now, I can use my PowerShell prompt function to display a calendar. 

The calendar module and functions are quite helpful, and the calendar prompt merits the Wacky Ideas category.

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Updating the Powershell Kernel in Azure Data Studio Notebooks

Published 2020-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Pusateri has a two-parter on Powershell notebooks. First up is the problem:

PowerShell Notebooks are a great new feature in Azure Data Studio, first becoming available in the November 2019 release. Like SQL notebooks, PowerShell notebooks are based on Jupyter Notebooks format, which are interactive documents containing text and executable code blocks.

Having some working PowerShell code that I wanted to share along with explanations and examples, I created a PowerShell Notebook. The only problem was my functions would never initialize. Actually they would never stop initializing – I would run the cell they were defined in, and it would just keep running forever.

And then Bob has the solution:

It turns out I did not have the latest version of the PowerShell Kernel running on my machine. The latest version is currently 0.1.3, and I had 0.1.2. Upgrading appears to have solved this issue for me – yay!

This solution also raises the issue that there is no notification from Azure Data Studio that a PowerShell Kernel exists or is in need of updating. I (and probably others) will just believe that as long as Azure Data Studio is up to date, we’re good to go. So how does one update their PowerShell kernel? Well, it’s simple, but not intuitive.

Read on to see how.

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Find Installed ODBC Drivers with Powershell

Published 2020-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vamvas answers a question:

Question: I had a question from a developer who was troubleshooting an application to SQL Server connection via a DSN using ODBC. They wanted the SQL Server ODBC Driver names and platform (32 bit|64 bit) used to connect . They will use this information to check application compatibility.

Although i can just RDP onto the server and grab the information through the ODBC gui – how can I use Powershell to get these ODBC details?

Click through for the answer.

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Creating a UI in Powershell

Published 2020-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Berthold walks us through a useful example of using POSHGUI’s UI editor:

Some time back, a customer and I were working with the SentryOne PowerShell Module. Our PowerShell Module lets you manage the targets you are monitoring with SentryOne using a script or command line rather than the UI. This is a great time saver when you’re administering performance monitoring for hundreds or thousands of database servers.

The customer and I worked together to type up the commands they wanted for their script. They mentioned how it would be great if there were a GUI for this. This seemed odd initially, because the reason we were doing this in the first place was to automate these actions outside of a GUI. We spoke on it for a bit, and their meaning become clear. They envisioned a simple GUI used to guide in defining the commands for the PowerShell Module. I agreed that this would be helpful in getting a head start on scripting automation. I decided to find a way to fill this need.

This post explores one way to create a GUI using PowerShell. I’m using the SentryOne PowerShell Module for this example, but this method can be used for any PowerShell script.

Click through to see the example.

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Backing Up Extended Events Sessions

Published 2020-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall shows us how to back up Extended Events sessions using Powershell:

Quite some time ago, I shared a few articles that peeled back the top layer of how to use PowerShell (PoSh) with Extended Events (XEvents). Among those articles, I showed how to retrieve the metadata, predicates and actions, and targets (to mention a few). Those are prime examples of articles showing some of the basics, which means there is plenty of room for some deeper dive articles involving both PoSh and XEvents. One topic that can help us bridge to the deeper end of the XEvents pool is how to generate scripts for our XEvent Sessions.

In this article, I will venture to show how to generate good backup scripts of our sessions using PoSh. That said, there are some caveats to using PoSh to generate these scripts and I will share those as well.

Read the whole thing, especially because there is one doozy of a caveat at the end.

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Getting a List of Power BI Pro Licensed Users

Published 2020-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Powell shares a Powershell script to retrieve Power BI Pro licensed users:

Per the Power BI licensing documentation, a pro license is required for publishing and editing content in app workspaces. If the app workspace is not assigned to a premium capacity, even the users viewing/consuming the content will require a pro license.

Pro license assignments are also very important from a governance perspective. An organization that has provisioned premium capacity would generally want to limit the number users with pro licenses to users who A) have a clear need for developing and publishing Power BI artifacts (dashboards, reports, dataflows, datasets) on an ongoing basis and B) have received some form of training or certification on using Power BI effectively as well as the organization’s policies for using Power BI.

As one (very) simple example for an organization with premium capacity, two users in a department of ten could be determined to be the content creators for their department – perhaps one will build datasets and the other will build reports and dashboards. These two users, along with maybe a backup user, could be assigned pro licenses. Other users on the team without a pro license could still make development and test related contributions to their team’s projects via Power BI Desktop and the Viewer workspace role but they would rely on the pro users in their department for publishing and distributing content.

Click through for the script and a detailed explanation.

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Using dbatools to Manage Client Aliases

Published 2020-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire takes us through client aliases and how to manage them in dbatools:

SQL Client Aliases allow you to connect to a SQL Server instance using another name. This is especially useful during migrations. Want your servers to connect to the new SQL Server without modifying connection strings within your application? Or what if you could use easy-to-remember names for your docker containers? SQL Client Aliases can help.

Click through for the commands and some quick demonstration.

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