Category: Powershell

Jana Sattainathan shows how to use Powershell to look up a group of Active Directory users’ managers:

Today, I received a request to find the manager for a whole bunch of users. This was a list of names (not UserId’s) in a Excel worksheet.

It is not actually that complex to do it

1. Locate the AD user based on the name

2. Check the Manager property

3. Lookup AD again for Manager to get the name

Click through for the script.  This does, of course, assume that the information is already in Active Directory somewhere.

Steve Jones uses dbatools to fix orphaned users:

One of the common issues that I would run into with refreshing development and test environments are the orphaned users. These are accounts that typically exist in production, but not in development. The logins and users are different in these environments, and often there isn’t a login on the development instance. This creates an orphaned user: one that exists in the database, but has no instance level mapping.

Cleaning up these users isn’t that hard, often with a removal of the user, mapping to a different login, or repairing this user by adding back the server login.  These aren’t difficult tasks, but the logic to write a script to quickly fix this, especially in a DR situation, may not be handy.

Read on to see how easy dbatools makes this.

Andy Mallon shows off the drive-based navigation available in the SQL Server Powershell module:

I recently noticed that the system objects were missing from my results when I do a Get-ChildItem. I noticed it with views, but then realized that none of the system objects showed up. What gives? I floundered through a quick Google search, where I knew I wasn’t searching for the right thing, and was not surprised when I didn’t see the answer.

I said to myself, “Andy, hold on a second & think. If something doesn’t want to open up, sometimes you just have to -force it open.”

I don’t tend to use this much, as I have recollections of it being slow.  Nonetheless, it is good to know about.

Jana Sattainathan has to find and replace a lot of code:

The database has 100’s of stored procedures (700+ to be somewhat precise)

Qualifying stored procedures have these characteristics

• Procedure name ends with “_del”
• Procedure has the string “exec” in the code
• Procedure has the string “sp_execute” in the code

This is what needs to be done:

• Replace CREATE PROC with ALTER PROC

• Replace SYSTEM_USER with “ORIGINAL_LOGIN()”

• Replace AS at the beginning of CREATE PROC with “WITH EXECUTE AS OWNER AS”

• Comment out some SET statements

• …in fact, there could be any number of other changes

Read on to see how Jana did it.

Garry Bargsley walks us through a solution he implemented to load Excel file data into Powershell:

Recently one of our development teams has increased the request of importing an Excel file with 20 sheets in to 20 tables in a database from about once a quarter to multiple times a week and this past Monday was three times in one day.  I have been the lucky DBA to get these requests as of late and after Monday I was determined to fix the process.  The current procedure is to use the good ol’ Import/Export Wizard since this was a rare request. (This included a lot of point and click and possibility for manual error)  With increased requests and increased table counts I knew there had to be a better way to get this accomplished without grimacing each time I see the request.

Garry has a script which he uses, but which can be tailored for other uses pretty easily.

Stuart Moore shows an easy way to execute a Powershell script against multiple servers:

We setup new PsSessions using New-PsSession, I set ErrorAction to SilentlyContinue just in case a host isn’t available for some reason (if I was being good I’d try/catch here).

As we’re just using PS standard functionality here with Get-Service there’s no need to build a a new function, we can just call this directly here. By calling Invoke-Command against a session pointed at numerous hosts we can PowerShell handle all the connection management here and just assume the command will be ran against each host. if we were running against a lot of hosts then we would want to look into using the -ThrottleLimit parameter to limit the number of concurrent hosts we’re hitting. The one little trick here is using the using scope modifier here so PS pulls in the variable defined in our main scope (gory details on scoping here

Click through for the script, and do check out the comments, where Stuart gives a bit of advice when you’re trying to execute against a large number of servers.

Viorel Ciucu has a Powershell script using dbatools to configure a new SQL Server instance and migrate databases using TDE over to the new instance:

The second option (and the one we chose) was to leave the encryption enabled. In order to be able to attach the files, or to do restores from the backups you need to have the same certificate that was used for encryption. This certificate is protected by the master key.

To accomplish this:

1. Make backups of the master key and the certificates

2. Restore the key and certificates on the new principal and mirror pairs

Read on for the process.