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Category: Powershell

Tips and Traps with PowerShell 7

Published 2020-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks takes us through some of the tricky parts of migrating to Powershell 7:

A long established community best practice in PowerShell scripting is not using command and parameter aliases. In a cross-platform world, this is even more critical. You may have been in the habit of using Sort in your code in place of Sort-Object. I know I have. I didn’t mind bending the no alias rule abit because there was nothing cryptic about Sort.

But in the Linux world, sort is a native command. There is no PowerShell alias. If your code uses sort, on Linux it will call the native command which will most likely break your code.

Read on for several more hints.

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Preparing for Demos with Pester

Published 2020-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret has some advice for you if you ever give a presentation:

If you don’t know what Pester is, it’s a test framework for PowerShell.  In the simplest explanation, using their Domain-Specific Language (DSL) you describe how things should look. If all looks good it returns output in green and if it doesn’t you get red output.  There are a lot of great use cases for Pester, like using it to ensure your code does what it’s supposed to, using it to validate your SQL Server environment (dbachecks), or in this example using it to make sure your demos are setup and ready to go.

When I’m preparing for a presentation I go through the demos over and over again, so it’s easy to accidentally leave things in a state that will cause issues when I go to do my demos in the presentation. If you’re creating a table, for example, during the demo and you already created it practicing and then forgot to drop it, the demo gods will strike and it’ll fail when it matters most! A simple Pester test to check whether the table exists will solve this issue.

Even if you aren’t giving talks in public (or inside your company), Pester is a useful tool for ensuring that the thing you expect to be the case actually is the case.

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Setting Up a SQL Server Lab with AutomatedLab

Published 2020-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret looks at a very interesting Powershell module:

There is a fantastic PowerShell module called AutomatedLab that can enable you to easily build out a lab for the  specific scenario you need to test. Even better is the module comes with 70 sample scripts that you can start with and adapt to meet your needs.

The module gives you the option to work with Hyper-V or VMWare. I will say most of the examples are using Hyper-V, and that is what I’ll be using also.

For my lab I want a SQL Server 2019 instance joined to a domain, and a separate client machine that I can manage the SQL Server from. On the client I would need to be able to connect to the internet as I want to be able to download PowerShell modules from the gallery easily.

It’s about time for me to rebuild my lab, so I’ll need to check that out.

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Creating an Elastic Jobs Agent

Published 2020-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kate Smith continues a series on elastic jobs in Azure SQL Database:

Having laid the conceptual groundwork for Elastic Jobs in two previous postings (1, 2), I am now going to create an elastic job and associated credentials using PowerShell.  For this scenario, I have one or more databases with a table ‘T’ and statistics ‘tStats’. I want to enforce an update for these statistics every day. To do this, I need to check that my stats have been updated in the past day, and if not, update them. The T-SQL to update statistics on a table “T” with stats named “tStats” is simple:

Click through for the Powershell script.

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Searching for Functions in dbatools

Published 2020-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy wants to find a function in dbatools:

dbatools has a lot of functions. A lot. Over 550. There is a great command index on the website, and the documentation gets updated every time a new version is published. But sometimes, it feels like you can’t find what you need unless you already know the name of the thing you’re looking for. Other times, you might start writing your own wrapper around dbatools functions, or maybe start a new function from scratch, because it seems like the functionality you need isn’t there.

Read on to see how it works and a couple of examples.

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Displaying a Toast with Powershell

Published 2020-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret has some fun with dbatools and the BurntToast Powershell module:

I have just a quick tip for you today using the BurntToast module to notify us when a backup is complete. As DBAs there is always plenty to do, so we don’t want to have to sit and watch a long running script to catch the moment when it finishes.  Usually what happens to me is I kick off the script, move on to something else and then totally forget about it, perhaps until someone asks if it’s done yet. Oops. Well this tip will help avoid that.

Best used sparingly, but quite helpful when you’re working on a long-running task and need to get back to Spider Solitaire work.

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Finding Folder Sizes with Powershell

Published 2020-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks shows us a quick way to retrieve information on folder sizes:

It is simple enough to run Get-Childitem and pipe the results to Measure-Object.

But this can be often time consuming. The other drawbacks, besides typing is it takes extra work for format the results into something more user friendly. And if i want to include hidden files, I have to remember to use -Force with Get-ChildItem.

Cmdlets are nice and convenient. And I always recommend to beginner or even intermediate scripters, if there is a cmdlet to use over the .NET Framework, use the cmdlet. But there are always exceptions and as you grow in expertise, you’ll realize there are times when going directly to the .NET Framework is a better choice. Which is what I have done.

Click through for the solution.

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Using Pester with .NET Powershell Notebooks

Published 2020-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell has Powershell in notebooks, so of course Rob is going to write tests:

Using Pester to validate that an environment is as you expect it is a good resource for incident resolution, potentially enabling you to quickly establish an area to concentrate on for the issue. However, if you try to run Pester in a .NET Notebook you will receive an error

Click through for the reason why this error appears and a workaround until it’s fixed for real.

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Reading Azure DevOps Results in Powershell

Published 2020-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Broadbent doesn’t let the lack of an official Powershell module get in the way:

In my post Using Azure CLI to query Azure DevOps I explained how you can use the Azure CLI to query Azure DevOps so you can obtain useful information on builds, releases, and other useful information. The solution required a certain level of skill with JMESPath to manipulate your result sets -which as explained can be a little confusing.

However once you have a bare bones result set, it is likely that you will want to consume these results in a more user-friendly environment such as PowerShell so that you can build upon these data sets. I thought this would be an easy thing to do, but as you will see below it was anything but.

Read on for some thoughts and a sample script.

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