Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Powershell

Installing R From Powershell

Published 2019-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun shows us how to install R and RStudio via Powershell:

For the brevity of this post, I will only download couple of R packages from CRAN repository, but this list is indefinite.
There are ways many ways to retrieve the CRAN packages for particular R version using powershell. I will just demonstrate this by using Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet.
Pointing your cmdlet to URL: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/3.5  where  list of all packages for this version is available. But first we need to extract the HTML tag where information is stored.

There’s quite a bit of code here, but the upside is that you get the ability to automate server installs.

Comments closed

An Overview of dbatools with Jess and Bert

Published 2019-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Bert Wagner has a new video available:

dbatools is one of the coolest community projects I’ve seen – it is amazing how many commands are available to help make managing your SQL Server instances a breeze.

This week I had the opportunity to learn how to use dbatools to automate backups, change recovery models, and discover additional dbatools commands from dbatools contributor Jess Pomfret.

Jess Pomfret then goes into more detail on the commands in the video:

The final tip I had for Bert was how to use Find-DbaCommand to help him find the commands he needed to complete his tasks.

A lot of the commands have tags, which is a good way to find anything relating to compression.

That was a nice collaboration.

Comments closed

Default Parameters In Powershell

Published 2019-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy shows us how to use default parameters in Powershell:

By the 4th Invoke-DbaQuery, I found myself thinking “this repetitive typing kind of sucks.” Then I remembered Chrissy LeMaire’s segment in the first PSPowerHour where she talked about default values, and her accompanying dbatools blog post. Most of the blog posts and demos of this feature focus on using it from the command line, so I had overlooked the fact that I could use it from within a script as well, and even change the values when looping.
As it turns out – it works inside scripts and functions as well, and can make them a lot easier to read. And you’re not limited to the default parameters every time you call a given function; you can override the defaults by specifying the parameters when you call it.

Andy gives us an example with default values for a SQL Server instance and database, but also shows us how to override that.

Comments closed

Database Integration Testing With Pester

Published 2019-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ust Oldfield shows us an example of how we can perform database integration testing using Pester:

In a previous post, I gave an overview to integration tests and documenting integration points. In this post, I will give a practical example of developing and performing integration tests with the Pester framework for PowerShell. With a data platform, especially one hosted in Azure, it’s important to test that the Azure resources in your environment have been deployed and configured correctly. After we’ve done this, we can test the integration points on the platform, confident that all the components have been deployed.

The code for performing integration tests is written in PowerShell using the Pester Framework. The tests are run through Azure DevOps pipelines and are designed to test documented integration points. The PowerShell scripts, which contain the mechanism for executing tests, rely upon receiving the actual test definitions from a metadata database.

Click through for the script.

Comments closed

ASCII Block Text In Powershell

Published 2019-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Roman Gelman shows how to use the Write-Ascii cmdlet to build ASCII art-style text in Powershell:

The ​​​Write-Ascii function from my PowerShell MS-Module module can draw custom text in the PowerShell console using ASCII fonts. This article’s cover was drawn by the Write-Ascii function too. The below code does the same, it writes end of line (EOL) character or emulates the Enter key.

Read on for examples and enjoy.

Comments closed

Powershell Core On Ubuntu Using Docker

Published 2019-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad has an Ubuntu VM running Powershell Core on Docker:

While learning about Docker Container, I notice that is much easier to installed on a Linux system. In Windows, Hyper-V is a requirement to install Docker, and specially if you want to use the “Windows Subsystem in Linux” WSL feature, there’s more setup to complete. So, I’m not using Hyper-V, I’m using VMware Workstation.  To keeping simple, I created an Ubuntu 18.04 VM using VMWare Workstation.

You can find the Docker CE installation instructions in the following link.

If you’re using Ubuntu 18.04. make sure to install Curl, as it isn’t included in the OS.

Click through for instructions on how to set this up and join the three layers club (which is not quite the three commas club but close).

Comments closed

Automating Azure SQL Database Log Analytics

Published 2019-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni shares a Powershell script which automates deployment of Log Analytics for Azure SQL Database:

However, I’m working with a customer who is building their own service based on Azure SQL Database, and I have fully automated their database deployment process. I wanted to take this a few steps further and add the SQL Analytics step as part of our deployment. This was harder than I expected it to be—the code samples in the books online post above weren’t working in my environment. And furthermore, once I got it working, I was having failures in my Azure Automation Runbook once I got the code running in the PowerShell ISE (I was having issues using VS Code on my Mac).

Joey takes us through the problems and provides a working script.

Comments closed

Highlighting Words In Powershell

Published 2019-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Roman Gelman has a function which lets you highlight words in Powershell text:

Despite of the Write-HostHighlight function intended to work with a text (it highlights a substring within a string), it can operate with objects too. Generally, it accepts any input from any cmdlet. The output is not always looks nice, but it works! Let see some examples.

This looks a bit like newer versions of grep which highlight matched patterns. I like it.

Comments closed

Recreating Dropped Azure SQL Managed Instance DBs

Published 2019-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic has a script to re-create an Azure SQL Managed Instance database which you might accidentally have dropped:

Azure SQL Database – Managed Instance is fully-managed PaaS service that provides advanced disaster-recovery capabilities. Even if you accidentally drop the database or someone drops your database as part of security attack, Managed Instance will enable you to easily recover the dropped database.
Azure SQL Managed Instance performs automatic backups of you database every 5-10 minutes. If anything happens with your database and even if someone drops it, your data is not lost. Managed Instance enables you to easily re-create the dropped database from the automatic backups.

Click through for the Powershell script.

Comments closed

Get Windows Failover Cluster Errors

Published 2019-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse walks us through the Get-ClusterLog cmdlet in Powershell:

Sometimes you know that a problem occurred, but the tools are not giving you the right information.  If you ever look at the Cluster Failover Manager for a Windows Cluster, sometimes that can happen.  The user interface won’t show you any errors, but you KNOW there was an issue.  This is when knowing how to use other tools to extract information from the cluster log becomes useful.
You can choose to use either Powershell or a command at the command prompt.  I tend to lean towards Powershell. I find it easier to utilize and gives me the most flexibility.

Click through for an example, including of a method which filters out everything but error messages.

Comments closed