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Category: Powershell

Generating an Email List from Active Directory Users

Published 2020-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

James Livingston takes us through an interesting solution to a common problem:

If you’ve ever performed some impactful maintenance on a SQL Server, you probably notified users. If you’re great at documentation and already know exactly who to contact, this script isn’t for you. If you don’t have a user email list, this script will create it for you!

I used to manage 500 SQL Server instances and there was daily maintenance\changes going on constantly. I wrote this PowerShell script to automatically create an email list for me. This PowerShell script gathers the login information from an instance of SQL Server and then pulls their email address from Active Directory.

Read on to see the script in action.

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Truncating Paths in Powershell Prompts

Published 2020-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffery Hicks shares a method for shortening your displayed path in Powershell:

As you can see, I don’t have a lot of space left at my prompt. Usually, if I am staying in one location say for demos, I’ll create a PSDrive with a shorter name. I use the New-PSDriveHere command from the PSScriptTools module. But another option is to truncate the prompt. So instead of the long path you see here it might be C:\Users…\HelpDesk. I modified the default PowerShell prompt function to do just that.

Click through for the script and a few demos.

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Powershell 7 Release Candidate

Published 2020-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad has a nice update for us:

The moment everyone has been waiting for some time is here, PowerShell Release Candidate is available for download. This a “Go Live” release officially supported in production by Microsoft.

Everyone in the Microsoft PowerShell Team, with the help of the community, has done an excellent job with the evolution of this new version of PowerShell. Read all about it on the PowerShell DevBlogs recent post “Announcing the PowerShell 7.0 Release Candidate“.

Make sure to read all previous posts as they perfectly outlined under the “Why is PowerShell 7 so awesome?” section of the release candidate post.

Click through for more details. One of the nice things in this RC is a consistent Out-Gridview experience, so it’s not just for Windows anymore.

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Changing Synapse Analytics Resource Classes with Azure Automation

Published 2019-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

John McCormack wins today’s edition of Cloud Bingo:

I was a approached by a data warehouse developer who wanted to be able to take advantage of the feature in Azure Synapse Analytics (Formerly Azure SQL Data Warehouse) called ‘Resource classes’. Resource classes allow users in certain roles to have access to extra compute resources for their queries. This can increase their max memory per query (although there is an overall trade-off on concurrency). Unfortunately, due to this being managed via roles, the person looking to change resource classes needs to be in the db_owner role so they can manage database role membership. As I didn’t want to add the developer to the db_owner role, a different solution was required.

John gives us a nice answer to this problem. Click through for the script.

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Posting SQL Query Results to Teams with Powershell

Published 2019-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Bourgon shows how we can post SQL Server result sets to Microsoft Teams channels:

So…. you want to post to a Teams channel automagically.  Should be simple, and it is!  Alas, it means you have to ignore most of the documentation.  Let’s do this!

1) Here’s how to hook it up with your channel.  Note that when I created a brand new “Team”, it took about 5-10 minutes before I was able to add the webhook connector – prior to that, I got a “channel does not exist or has been deleted”.

Michael takes us through it step by step and also includes things you should avoid, including misleading documentation.

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Multi-Server Diagnostics with dbatools

Published 2019-11-26 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori shows how we can collect diagnostic information from multiple SQL Server instances by way of dbatools:

What I really love about PowerShell is how simple it is to filter, extend and manipulate tabular data using the pipeline, in a way that resonates a lot with the experience of T-SQL developers.

The main part of the script is the one that invokes all the diagnostic queries included in the list $queries. This is done by invoking the cmdlet Invoke-DbaDiagnosticQuery, that takes care of using a version of the diagnostic query that matches the version of the target server and selecting the data. As usual with dbatools, the -SqlInstance parameter accepts a list of servers, so you can pass in the list of all the SQL Servers in your infrastructure.

Gianluca has a GitHub repo for the script and explains it in more detail as well.

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Creating Azure Data Studio Notebooks Using Powershell

Published 2019-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell inverts the “Use Azure Data Studio to create Powershell notebooks” mantra:

This module contains only 3 commands at present

* Convert-ADSPowerShellForMarkdown

This will create the markdown link for embedding PowerShell code in a Text Cell for a SQL Notebook as described in this blog post

* New-ADSWorkBookCell

This command will create a workbook text cell or a code cell for adding to the New-ADSWorkBook command

* New-ADSWorkBook

This will create a new SQL Notebook using the cell objects created by New-ADSWorkBookCell

Click through for an example.

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Puzzles with Powershell

Published 2019-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan takes us through solving a couple of problems with Powershell:

As I said before, I am a regular at my local PowerShell user group. I keenly look forward to our monthly meetings. We share a lot of PowerShell code/tips/tricks among ourselves. It is a small but close-knit group. Yesterday, one of the members, Jason Walker came up with coding puzzles for the group. This blog post is about the puzzles Jason created for solving using PowerShell. This is the kind of simple stuff that keeps the meetings interesting and fun (besides the Pizza!).

My solutions may not be the most elegant or concise but they work and were created on the fly during the meeting!

Read on for the four puzzles as well as solutions.

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SQL Server Trends Worth Watching

Published 2019-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey follows up on a Kevin Hill tweet:

There are a million things to learn about in our rapidly shifting technological landscape, but I think this assessment, especially the way it was put, “no longer justify ignoring” really nails some of the fundamentals.

Let’s talk about why you can no longer ignore Docker, Git and DBATools either.

If you’re a DBA and aren’t familiar with Docker, Git, or DBATools, that’s a pretty good trio of things to spend some time learning. You can survive without them, but you’re more likely to thrive if you know them.

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Powershell Notebooks in Azure Data Studio

Published 2019-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson announces a new feature in Azure Data Studio:

In order to get all the nice intellisense and tab completion features of the PowerShell language inside your PowerShell Notebooks, be sure to install the PowerShell extension from the Azure Data Studio marketplace.

At this point, the biggest remaining language is R, though I’d love to see F# support as well (hey, Azure Notebooks offers F# support).

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