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Category: Powershell

Managing Central Management Server

Published 2018-07-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire shows how you can use dbatools to manage Central Management Server and registered servers:

It’s a super useful feature that not all DBAs know about. Since CMS data is stored in msdb and accessible via SMO, you can access it from SQL Server Management Studio or PowerShell modules like dbatools.

Central Management Server’s essential functionality includes:

Actions that are taken by using a central management server group act on all servers in the server group. This includes connecting to servers by using Object Explorer and executing Transact-SQL statements and Policy-Based Management policies on multiple servers at the same time.

I mostly use it as a visual repository of my SQL Servers. Prior to using dbatools and Invoke-DbaSqlQuery, however, I did use CMS to easily execute code against a number of different servers.

CMS is a great feature, and is a critical tool for scaling out a SQL Server infrastructure.

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Generating Index Drop And Create Statements

Published 2018-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele says “Game over, man, game over!” to indexes:

The premise is simple: it will generate a series of DROP and then CREATE INDEX commands for every index. The process is a little more complex in practice, but at a high level it:

  1. Creates a special schema to house a temporary object,
  2. Creates a special stored procedure to run the code,
  3. Calls said stored procedure,
  4. Generates a bunch of PRINT statements that serve as the output (along with new line support for readability),
  5. Cleans up the stored procedure it generated,
  6. And finally deletes the schema it created.

Nifty.

Click through for the script, as well as a bonus Powershell script.  Because hey, it’s only six lines of code.

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Instance-To-Instance Migrations With Start-DbaMigration

Published 2018-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire touts one of the best parts of dbatools:

dbatools is such a fun toolset to work on, but specifically, I can no longer live without Start-DbaMigration. Even in smaller shops, migrations are often required and they are always a lot of work.

At least they used to be, before I built the command that started it all: Start-DbaMigration. Start-DbaMigration is an instance to instance migration command that migrates just about everything. It’s really a wrapper that simplifies nearly 30 other copy commands, including Copy-DbaDatabase, Copy-DbaLogin, and Copy-DbaSqlServerAgent.

Also a bonus shout out to dbachecks.

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SQL Server Vulnerability Assessment Powershell Cmdlets

Published 2018-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ronit Reger announces a new set of SQL Server vulnerability assessment Powershell cmdlets:

SQL Vulnerability Assessment (VA) is a service that provides visibility into your security state, and includes actionable steps to resolve security issues, and enhance your database security. It can help you:

  • Meet compliance requirements that require database scan reports.
  • Meet data privacy standards.
  • Monitor a dynamic database environment where changes are difficult to track.

VA runs vulnerability scans on your database, flagging security vulnerabilities and highlight deviations from best practices, such as misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and unprotected sensitive data. The rules are based on Microsoft’s best practices and focus on the security issues that present the biggest risks to your database and its valuable data. These rules also represent many of the requirements from various regulatory bodies to meet their compliance standards.

Results of the scan include actionable steps to resolve each issue and provide customized remediation scripts where applicable. An assessment report can be customized for your environment by setting an acceptable baseline for permission configurations, feature configurations, and database settings. This baseline is then used as a basis for comparison in subsequent scans, to detect deviations or drifts from your secure database state.

Read on for more, and if you’re interested, the cmdlets are available in the SqlServer Powershell module.

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Updating SQL Agent Job Owners With dbatools

Published 2018-06-29 by Kevin Feasel

Stuart Moore gives us two methods of updating SQL Agent job owners, one using T-SQL and the other with dbatools:

Now we all know that having SQL Server Agent jobs owned by ‘Real’ users isn’t a good idea. But I don’t keep that close an eye on some of our test instances, so wasn’t surprised when I spotted this showing up in the monitoring:

The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner (OldDeveloper) of job important_server_job has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user 'OldDeveloper', error code 0x534. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 15404)).

Wanting to fix this as quickly and simply as possible I just wanted to bulk move them to our job owning account (let’s use the imaginative name of ‘JobOwner’).

Click through for both scripts.

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Database Snapshots In dbatools

Published 2018-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire shows how easy it is to create and manage database snapshots with dbatools:

New-DbaDbSnapshot

To create a new snapshot, you no longer need to know the path of the snapshot location (though we do support custom paths). You don’t even need to specify a name! But you can, of course.

I haven’t used database snapshots in a while, but I do appreciate them, especially for testing scenarios.

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Scripting Maintenance Mode Tasks

Published 2018-06-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick shares some hard-earned knowledge regarding scripting out maintenance tasks using Powershell:

Given that we have several hundred servers (and growing), this process is taking an increasing amount of time each month. Over the years we’ve implemented various automated patching systems (WSUS, IBM BigFix, etc.) and they’ve worked reasonably well for managing the Download & Install step. The pain point lately has become the first two steps (snapshots and maintenance mode). Both processes are simple to complete using the VCenter web-based user interface and SCOM console. The problem is the volume of button clicks it takes to complete the process for ALL of the servers. Using the standard (web) user interfaces, over an hour of the monthly maintenance window can be lost to just getting the snapshots and maintenance mode tasks completed. Extrapolate that out over a year and we’re looking at over 1.5 DAYS of work-time lost to getting the servers ready to START applying updates. That’s not a statistic we want to publish to senior management. So, how to fix (or minimize) the problem? The answer to which is: Script It.

Let’s take a look at how to use PowerShell to automate the snapshot and maintenance mode tasks.

Read on for sample scripts.

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Is That Share SMB1?

Published 2018-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon shows us how to tell if a particular Windows share is using SMB1:

In case you’ve missed it (though, if you’re a data professional or other IT pro, you must live under a rock if you’ve missed it), SMBv1 should never ever be used. Alas, some shares out there still exist & use it.

Recent Windows updates have tried to turn off SMBv1 , alas Microsoft’s Ned Pyle (twitter|blog) still maintains a long list of products that still need SMBv1.

As a DBA, you probably don’t spend too much time managing file shares, or worrying about SMB versions, but you should be asking yourself:

Does my backup target use SMBv1?

If it does, you should fix that.

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Resizing Azure Managed Instances

Published 2018-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic shows how to resize Azure SQL managed instances with Powershell:

Azure SQL Managed Instance is fully-managed SQL Server Database Engine hosted in Azure cloud. With Managed Instance you can easily add/remove cores associated to the instance and change the reserved size of the instance. You can use PowerShell to easily manage size of the instance and automate this process.

As a prerequisite, you need to have Azure SQL PowerShell libraries to configure Managed Instance. You would need to install Azure RM PowerShell and  AzureRm.Sql module that contains the commands for updating properties of Managed Instance.

Read on for a demo.

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