Category: Powershell

Chrissy LeMaire walks us through migrating an old, old application database to SQL Server 2017:

There was even a linked server in the mix, but our biggest concerns revolved around the changing collation and the Agent jobs, which were known to be brittle.

The destination test server was an existing shared server, which mirrored the scenario that would play out in production. And while the databases only needed to exist on the new server for a limited period of time, these migrated databases were going to be the most important databases on the entire instance. This meant that the SQL Server configs were going to have to cater to this app’s needs. One exception was the collation, as the accent sensitivity was determined not to be a big deal and the vendor agreed.

Read on to see how Chrissy did it. The answer, naturally, is with dbatools.

Greg Moore shows how to build out secure strings in Powershell:

One of the more common problems I’ve faced with a particular client is setting up data extractions from outside sources such as SFTP servers. Since this client deals with PII data, it’s essential that this is done in as a secure manner as possible. For example, all connections need to be encrypted using protocols such as SFTP instead of FTP.

Securely connecting is particularly easy to accomplish if one uses a 3^rd party module such as Posh-SSH. However, you are still stuck with the problem of logging into the remote SFTP server securely.

Keeping credentials secured is something which Powershell makes pretty easy. I can’t think of a reason why you’d ever need to keep credentials in plaintext here.

Claudio Silva takes us through a change to several cmdlets in dbatools:

I wondered why and asked the Windows team if they could provide any insight. A colleague explained to me that I needed to change three things to make my remoting commands work on our network:

1. Use the FQDN on -ComputerName and/or -SqlInstance parameters
2. Use -UseSSL parameter on the New-PSSession command
3. Use -IncludePortInSPN parameter for the New-PsSessionOption command

Read the whole thing.

Shane O’Neill takes us through some of the intricacies of dot-sourcing in Powershell:

The dot used to represent the location is, as I’ve said before, for the current location. Our ConvertTo-Message02 script changed it’s location as part of the script.

When we used the “dot source dot location” method, we weren’t using where our function is as a frame of reference to import the other functions. We were using what directory we are currently in.

Interesting reading.

Mike Robbins has a quick script to find aliases for parameters in Powershell cmdlets:

While sitting through Jeff Hicks‘ Advanced PowerShell Scripting Workshop at PowerShell on the River in Chattanooga today, he mentioned there being a “Cn” alias for the ComputerName parameter of commands in PowerShell.

I’ve previously written a one-liner to find parameter aliases and at one time Microsoft had starting adding parameter aliases to the help for commands as referenced in that same blog article, but it appears that they’ve discontinued adding them to the help and removed the ones they previously added to it.

To be honest, I don’t like aliases that much. Between tab completion and nearest match (where I can type “C” and get “ComputerName” because it’s the only parameter which starts with a C), that satisfies one-off scripts. And for reusable scripts, I’d want to use full names so that the next person doesn’t hunt me down because all of my parameters look like “C” or “Dep”.