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Category: Powershell

SQL Assessment API Public Preview 2

Published 2019-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ebru Ersan announces public preview 2 of the SQL Assessment API:

SQL Assessment API is a new mechanism to evaluate configuration of your SQL Server for best practices. The API methods are used by means of a SQL Server Management Object (SMO) extension and new cmdlets in SqlServer PowerShell module. API is delivered with a ruleset that is highly customizable and extensible. It can be used to assess SQL Server versions 2012 and higher, both on Windows and Linux.

Read on for instructions on how to install and what has changed since public preview 1.

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Using the Power BI API

Published 2019-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Pries takes us through the Power BI API with Powershell:

The Power BI API is a way of essentially bypassing the web interface of powerbi.com and asking questions directly to the back-end of the service (without bypassing security). Using this allows you to issue a command, such as “Give me a list of all of the workspaces” and receive just the result data in a bulk data format. While outside the scope of this exercise, the API also allows reading actual business data from Power BI assets and even manipulating assets.

For my first attempt at interacting with the API, I decided to try the Microsoft developed Powershell Cmdlets. These are a set of free Powershell commands which can be installed on your workstation and then will query the Power BI API and return results in a standard way without the need to write any code (C# or otherwise) or understand how to read a JSON response.

Jeff does more than just hit API endpoints, though, so read the whole thing.

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Listing Windows Users with Powershell

Published 2019-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vamvas shows us how we can use Powershell to list Windows users in an Active Directory group:

Question: How can I use Powershell to list out Windows users? Are there Powershell cmdlets which can report on Windows users ?
Answer: There are “out of the box” Powershell cmdlets which will support the requirement . How you apply the powershell cmdlets will depend on how much detail is required.

Jack has a few examples here as well.

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Using dbatools Instead of RDP

Published 2019-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley shows how we can use dbatools to do some of the things which we might naturally do with Remote Desktop:

So you hear this spread across the Twitterverse and Blogosphere. You should not RDP your SQL Servers to do administrative work. My nature has always been to troubleshoot issues from the server in an RDP session.

When I received a disk space alert on a development system I was about to RDP and do my thing. But I said wait, let me approach this from a different perspective…

To the rescue is dbatools as always seems to be the case these days.

Remoting is much less resource-intensive and it lets you scale out to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of servers without any more effort on your part. It’s rare that you get constant scaling, so take advantage of it where you can.

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File Sizes in dbatools

Published 2019-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire gives us several ways to format file sizes with dbatools:

Within dbatools, you may notice file sizes are pretty and human-readable.

That was some C# based magic created by Microsoft PFE and creator of PSFramework, Fred Weinmann. In the background, SQL Server often gives us different types of numbers to represent file sizes. Sometimes it’s bytes, sometimes it’s megabytes. We wanted to standardize the sizing in dbatools, and thus the dbasize type was born.

Human-readable file sizes are great but they make it difficult to compare when piping sets of data to Format-Table. Knowing how to override this when necessary gets you the best of both worlds.

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Goodbye, Powershell 5.1 Ad

Published 2019-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire has a Powershell ad blocker:

I really abhor the new ad in the PowerShell 5.1 console and it seems there’s no hope of Microsoft making it go away.

After a long, involved Twitter conversation with the community and the PowerShell team that confirmed it’s impossible for the advertisement (?!) to be easily removed, it looks like the only solution is to bypass it. Przemysław Kłys has a great suggestion to emulate the old prompt that totally works!

Click through for that solution.

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dbatools: the Book

Published 2019-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire has an exciting announcement:

After nearly 10 months of work, early access to Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches is now available from our favorite publisher, Manning Publications!

For years, people have asked if any dbatools books are available and the answer now can finally be yes, mostly. Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches, written by me and Rob Sewell (the DBA with the beard), is now available for purchase, even as we’re still writing it. And as of today, you can even use the code bldbatools50 to get a whopping 50% off.

They’re in active book development, so buy a copy now and watch as the book evolves.

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Migrating to SQL Managed Instances with dbatools

Published 2019-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic shows how we can perform an offline migration from on-prem/IaaS SQL Server to a SQL Managed Instance using dbatools:

Typically, the offline migration process looks like:

– You need to create an Azure Blob Storage account that will be used to temporary hold the database backups that will be moved from SQL Server to Managed Instance.
– You need to back up the databases to Azure Blob Storage and restore them from Azure Blob Storage to Managed Instance.
– You need to migrate server-level objects such as logins, agent jobs from the source to destination instance.

In this article, I will use Azure PowerShell to create and manage necessary Azure resources, and DBATools PowerShell library to initiate migration.

Read on for the process, including the Powershell scripts and dbatools calls needed.

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Breaking Out Powershell Functions with Powershell

Published 2019-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill shows us how we can use Powershell to break Powershell functions out into their own files:

The stupid thing that I was doing was that I was manually, visually scanning the script, copying out the function definitions, and pasting them into their own function files.

This was long, this was tedious, and this was not a efficient use of my time.

Especially since the scripts were not laid out as logically as I would have liked.

Click through to see how Shane solved this.

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