Category: Powershell

Claudio Silva explains the default displayed properties in Powershell and how you can find non-default properties:

First, let me say that this person knows that Select-Object can be used to select the properties we want, so he tried to guess the property name using a trial/error approach.

The person tried:

Get-Service WinRM | Select-Object Startup, Status, Name, DisplayName

and also:

Get-Service WinRM | Select-Object StartupType, Status, Name, DisplayName

But all of them were just empty.

There is a better way.

Chris Taylor demonstrates a couple ways of switching from Linux to Windows containers in Docker for Windows:

If you are using Docker for Windows and want to switch between Linux or Windows containers you can do this by right clicking the Docker “Whale” in the systray and selecting “Switch to Windows containers”:

….but no one likes clicking around do they!

There is an alternative way to do this which I use in my docker session demo’s which makes things so much easier and the switch is a lot quicker!

Click through for the Powershell call, which has the added benefit of being scriptable.

Drew Furgiuele shows us how we can use the sqlserver Powershell module to find linked server references in code:

SQL Search is doing exactly what it’s designed to do here: it’s finding every object that matches that string, HumanResources. It’s unfortunate that it also happens to be the name of my linked server and a schema in my database, but such is life, right? Its returning every object it hits a match on, which includes a bunch of views, plus one of those views actually contains my linked server reference.

I love SQL Search

Let me be clear: I’m not here to gang up on the fine folks at Redgate. This tool is beautiful and I love it. Otherwise, how else could we quickly search for objects in our databases? The alterative would be either querying system views for object definitions or using cursors to call sp_helptext over and over, and then trying to do pattern matching. Same as what SQL Search does.

There’s no easy way to sort this wheat from chaff, is there? This might be a starting point; let’s narrow down the search the objects we might need to look at. Then, we’ll manually script each one out, one at a time. That sounds an awful lot like a manual process. “If only there was a way to automate this checking”, he asked, sarcastically.

Click through for a very interesting cmdlet.

Mike Robbins shows how to split out validation from your primary function within Powershell:

They responded by asking if it was possible to move the custom message that Throw returns to the private function. At first, I didn’t think this would be possible, but decided to try the code to make an accurate determination instead of just assuming it wasn’t possible.

I’ve now learned something else which makes the whole process of moving the validation from the ValidateScript block to a private function much more user friendly which is what I think the person who asked the question was trying to accomplish.

If you have several parameters with somewhat complex validation logic, this makes maintenance a lot easier.

Bob Pusateri shows how to keep a dataset up to date using Powershell and dbatools:

Now for the magic – let’s load some data! The dbatools command that does all the heavy lifting here is called Import-DbaCsvToSql. It loads CSV files into a SQL Server table quickly and easily. As an added bonus, the entire import is within a transaction, so if an error occurs everything gets rolled back. I like to specify my tables and datatypes ahead of time, but if you want to load into a table that doesn’t exist yet, this script will create a table and do its best to guess the appropriate datatype. To use, simply point it at a CSV file and a SQL Server instance, database, and (optionally) a table. It will take care of the rest.

It’s a nice post covering one more method of automating data loads without a major amount of orchestration.