A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
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.
Comments closedMark 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.
Comments closedThis post is inspired by an odd situation I ran into in a project I’m working on. I have the need to pull specific revisions of files out of a git repository, save those files, and then execute the contents. This all worked fine until it didn’t. I received some complaints that unicode characters in the files we getting mangled, and sure enough they were. But why? In this post I’ll explain what happened to me, and ways you can avoid it yourself.
Read on to learn how.
Comments closedMax Trinidad shows us how to install .NET Interactive on Linux:
In Windows, just takes a few steps to set it up. For Linux, it takes a few extra steps but still is quick enough to get you started.
For Windows, follow the instructions found at the .NET Interactive page in Github.
For Linux, for Ubuntu 18.04, follow the blog post “Ubuntu 18.04 Package Manager – Install .NET Core“.
Basically, in either operating systems, you install:
– Install the .NET Core SDK
– Install the ASP.NET Core runtime
– Install the .NET Core runtime
Click through for the step-by-step instructions. Once you have it done, you get not only Powershell but also F# and C#.
Comments closedRob 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.
Comments closedMark 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-Runspaceyou’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.
Comments closedSander 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.
Comments closedJeffrey 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.
Comments closedBob 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.
Comments closedJack 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.
Comments closed