Category: Powershell

Rob Sewell shows off how easily to splat Powershell parameters with Visual Studio Code:

Well you will know that when you call a PowerShell function you can use intellisense to get the parameters and sometimes the parameter values as well. This can leave you with a command that looks like this on the screen

1	Start-DbaMigration -Source $Source -Destination $Destination -BackupRestore -NetworkShare $Share -WithReplace -ReuseSourceFolderStructure -IncludeSupportDbs -NoAgentServer -NoAudits -NoResourceGovernor -NoSaRename -NoBackupDevices

It goes on and on and on and while it is easy to type once, it is not so easy to see which values have been chosen. It is also not so easy to change the values.

By Splatting the parameters it makes it much easier to read and also to alter.

To learn more about splatting, there’s a whole section in Powershell help on the topic.

Fred Weinmann gives us a reading list of Powershell built-in documentation:

Newcomers to PowerShell are often faced with a lot of things to learn, a lot of disorienting features and little in the way of obvious guidance. While there are quite a few good books out there by now, finding the right one is not always easy.

That said, PowerShell comes with a lot of built in documentation:

Get-Help about_*

Will list a whole lot of articles explaining many a concept, but finding just what you need – especially before you know all the right words to search for – is a lot harder.

There’s a lot to this and more seasoned developers can skip a lot of it, but if you’re just learning about Powershell, I think it’s a nice ordering of where to start learning.

Jana Sattainathan shows how to split a file with a large number of independent operations and have Powershell run the job in batches:

Everyday is an interesting day in the life of a DBA. Today, I received a request to run in a HUGE script. This script had 125k INSERT statements each in a separate line. Just opening the script was an issue, leave alone running it into a database. You get this error in SSMS just trying to open – “The operation could not be completed. Not enough storage is available to complete this operation”

This is how I handled it

1. I split the file into a manageable 1000 line files (total of 125 files)
2. Looped through each split file and ran it in!

Yes, it was that simple. Thanks to PowerShell!

Read on to see how simple it is.

Rob Sewell walks us through dbachecks configuration:

So I can import this configuration and run my checks with it any time I like. This means that I can create many different test configurations for my many different environment or estate configurations.

Yes, I know “good/best practice” says we should use the same configuration for all of our instances but we know that isn’t true. We have instances that were set up 15 years ago that are still in production. We have instances from the companies our organisation has bought over the years that were set up by system administrators. We have instances that were set up by shadow IT and now we have to support but cant change.

As well as those though, we also have different environments. Our development or test environment will have different requirements to our production environments.

This is a good, code-filled demonstration with a few videos as well.  If you want to get started with dbachecks, this is a good place to begin.

Cody Konior has a good post on using psake to populate the FunctionsToExport section of a module definition:

The “best practice” and proper way of handling this then is to add an entry to the array in this file every time you create a new function. Manually. What a pain in the ass right? But there’s a better way!

If you haven’t seen psake before you can take a look later. Start up PowerShell as Administrator and install psake from the PowerShell Gallery using Install-Module psake and then you’re ready to go.

How does psake work? It’s the PowerShell equivalent of a Makefile. Basically:

• You add a file in the root of your module called psakefile.ps1

• When you run Invoke-psake from that location, it will load and execute the file

For a one-off module with one or two functions, it’s probably not worth it, but once you get to several functions (or if you’re building modules regularly), this looks like a time-saver.

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.