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Category: Powershell

Getting Maintenance Plan Information From Powershell

Published 2018-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill gives us the low-down on what we need to do in order to retrieve maintenance plan information from SQL Server using Powershell:

It’s surprisingly difficult to get this information in SQL Server. In fact I was quite stuck trying to figure out how to get this information when I realized that the good people over at Brent Ozar Unlimited already do some checking on this for their sp_Blitz tool.

A quick look at the above code showed me that dbo.sysssispackages was what I was looking for. Combine this with:

  • 1. Some hack-y SQL for the frequency in human readable format, and
  • 2. Some even more hack-y SQL to join on the SQL Agent Job name

And we had pretty much the XML for the Maintenance Plan and the SQL Agent Job Schedule that they were against.

Shane has made the code available as well, so check it out if you have any maintenance plans you’re trying to understand and maybe even get away from.

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Improvements To The SQL Server Availability Group Failover Detection Utility

Published 2018-12-03 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell has a few improvements to the SQL Server Availability Group Failover Detection Powershell function:

Archive the data for historical analysis

One of the production DBAs pointed out that having gathered the information, it would be useful to hold it for better analysis of repeated issues. I have added an archiving step so that when the tools runs, if there is already data in the data gathering folder, it will copy that to an archive folder and name it with the date and time that the cluster log was created as this is a good estimation of when the analysis was performed. If an archive folder location is not provided it will create an archive folder in the data folder. This is not an ideal solution though, as the utility will copy all of the files and folders from there to its own location so it is better to define an archive folder in the parameters.

There are several improvements in here, so check them out.

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dbatools: On The Way To 1.0

Published 2018-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire points out a bunch of changes to dbatools:

Aliases have been added for the changes, so these are not breaking changes:

  • Mismatched Copy commands have been renamed to match their corresponding Get command names (ie. Copy-DbaCentralManagementServer is now Copy-DbaCmsRegServer).

  • Most parameters named Password have been changed to SecurePassword. They’ve always been a SecureStringdata type but this makes that clear.

  • The parameters ExcludeAllSystemDb and ExcludeAllUserDb have been changed to ExcludeSystem and ExcludeUser, respectively.

These are some of the non-breaking changes, but this latest release has several breaking changes too.  Chrissy is promising no more breaking changes for a little while, so it’s probably a good time to upgrade and check those scripts to see what you need to change.

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Checking If Ports Are Open Using Powershell

Published 2018-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino has a quick Powershell script to see if ports are open on a machine:

Ever want to confirm that a port is accessible from one computer to another? There’s a PowerShell cmdlet for that, Test-NetConnection. With the -Port option, this cmdlet will do a quick TCP three-way handshake on the remote system to confirm that the service is available and reports back if it succeeded or not. Check out that last line of output TcpTestSucceeded: False. That indicates that this port is not accessible. You can see, however, that the system is reachable via ICMP (Ping), PingSuceeded: True so we know that the remote system is alive, just not listening on the port we want to access.

For when your security team won’t let you install nmap.

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Working With The Databricks API Via Powershell

Published 2018-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl has a Powershell module for interacting with Databricks, either Azure or AWS:

As most of our deployments use PowerShell I wrote some cmdlets to easily work with the Databricks API in my scripts. These included managing clusters (create, start, stop, …), deploying content/notebooks, adding secrets, executing jobs/notebooks, etc. After some time I ended up having 20+ single scripts which was not really maintainable any more. So I packed them into a PowerShell module and also published it to the PowerShell Gallery (https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/DatabricksPS) for everyone to use!

This looks like a pretty good module if you work with Databricks.

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Managing Powershell Core On Non-Windows Machines

Published 2018-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad shows us how to grab the latest version of Powershell Core if you aren’t using Windows:

So, if PowerShell Core isn’t available in the package repository, with a few steps you can download and install PowerShell. But, the first thing I do is to remove it before installing.

Ubuntu

## - When PowerShell Core isn't available in their repository: (download and execute install)
cd Downloads
wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v6.1.1/powershell_6.1.1-1.ubuntu.18.04_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i powershell_6.1.1-1.ubuntu.18.04_amd64.deb

## - When available in Apt/Apt-Get repository:
sudo apt install -y powershell #-> Or, powershell-preview

Click through for demos of CentOS (or any other yum-based system) and MacOS X.

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Breaking Changes Coming To dbatools

Published 2018-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire warns us about breaking changes coming to dbatools with release 1.0:

Sometime in the next month, I’ll also be updating Start-DbaMigration to more closely match the parameters of Export-DbaInstance. Parameters like NoDatabases and NoLogins will be replaced by -Exclude Databases, Logins.

So the functionality won’t necessarily change, but if you have scheduled tasks or scripts that perform migrations, you will need to update your parameters once you update dbatools once these changes are made.

Keep an eye out for all of these changes if you’re a regular dbatools user or have processes scripted.

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Removing The Azure Module

Published 2018-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad has built a function to remove older versions of the Azure module:

As you probably know by now, “Azure RM” modules has been renamed to “Az” Module. Microsoft want you to start using this module moving forward. Currently, this new release is on version 0.5.0, and you’ll need to remove the any previous module(s) installed. Information about Azure PowerShell can be found on the following link.

Now, there’s always been a tedious task when manually removing module dependencies, and there’s no exception with the “Az” module.  So, we can all take advantage to PowerShell and create a script to work around this limitation.

And, below is a few options.

Max also provides us a couple of other options as well.

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Useful Powershell Aliases For Docker

Published 2018-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Elton Stoneman shares a few useful aliases in Powershell for managing Docker containers:

Docker PowerShell Alias #2 – drmf

Removes all containers, whether they’re running or not. Useful when you want to reset your running containers and get back to zero:

function Remove-AllContainers {  
    docker container rm -f $(docker container ls -aq)
}
Set-Alias drmf  Remove-AllContainers

Use with caution

Elton shares several more at the link and also includes a link to a Github gist with them all.

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