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Category: Powershell

AG Failover From Powershell

Published 2017-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Frank Gill has written a script to perform an Availability Group failover using Powershell:

The function takes a replica name as input and queries system tables for Availability Groups running as secondary that are online, healthy, and synchronous.  For each AG found, the function generates an ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP statement.  If the -noexec parm is set to 0, the command will be executed.  If -noexec is set to 1, the command will be written out to a file.

When writing the function, I started out trying to use the native PowerShell Availability Group cmdlets.  After several false starts, I found it easier to develop the T-SQL code in Management Studio and use Invoke-Sqlcmd to execute the code.  The code is available below.  I hope you can put it to use.

Click through for the script.

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Database Migrations With DBATools

Published 2017-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Squires has a series on database migrations using dbatools.  The first part covers capacity planning:

Great results, I now know that I cannot move the database from one server to another on any of the drives shown without expanding the drive volume.  Even though this was an awesome output, I wanted more. I know my data and log drives that I wanted to focus on so I decided to dump everything into an array.

The second part is the actual migration:

In this post, I am going to show you the steps that I decided to take to do this particular migration.  This migration was going to be a bit different. I am merging two systems together, so I had to really think the process through and ensure I get everything I needed. I also did not want to rollback due to the systems being legacy and unsupported. Some of the hosts were going to be pushing storage limits so I had to ensure everything went flawlessly so I could decommission the legacy systems quickly.

Both of these have scripts and explanations attached, making it easy to follow along.

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Importing SSMS Registered Servers Into SQL Operations Studio

Published 2017-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele has a hankering for SQL Operations Studio and wants to invite a few servers to the party:

One barrier to entry is that the initial setup can be a little daunting, especially if you use a local connection groups or central management servers to keep track of registered connections in SQL Server Management Studio. You’d be in for a lot of manual clicking and typing of connections if you have a lot of saved connections. But there’s a better way: you can import all that saved information right into SQL Operations Studio, and it’s pretty painless, too. Buckle up, because this involves a little knowledge of how settings are saved in Operations Studio, and how we can quickly get saved connection information out of SSMS and into your new application. Spoiler alert, we’re going to use PowerShell.

I’d love to see CMS support in SQL Operations Studio.  In the meantime, this is a more or less reasonable alternative, depending upon how many servers you have and how frequently they change.

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Using The Restore-DbaDatabase Pipeline

Published 2017-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Stuart Moore describes the updated Restore-DbaDatabase cmdlet:

The biggest change is that Restore-DbaDatabase is now a wrapper around 5 public functions. The 5 functions are:

  • Get-DbabackupInformation
  • Select-DbabackupInformation
  • Format–DbabackupInformation
  • Test–DbabackupInformation
  • Invoke-DbaAdvancedRestore

These can be used individually for advanced restore scenarios, I’ll go through some examples in a later post.

Stuart then provides additional information at the various steps, explaining at a high level how things work.

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Spotting SQL Agent Job Differences

Published 2017-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell shows us how to compare SQL Agent jobs across Availability Group replicas:

On the plane home from PAS Summit I was sat next to someone who had also attended and when he saw on my laptop that I was part of the SQL Community we struck up a conversation. He asked me how he could compare SQL Agent Jobs across availability group replicas to ensure that they were the same.

He already knew that he could use Copy-DbaAgentJob from dbatools to copy the jobs between replicas and we discussed how to set up an Agent job to accomplish this. The best way to run an Agent Job with a PowerShell script is described here

Maybe I’m out in la-la land, but wouldn’t this be a perfect use case for MSX/TSX?

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Automatically Scripting Objects Using dbatools

Published 2017-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Constantine Kokkinos shows how easy it is to use dbatools to script out database objects:

@brianszadek says: I am looking to automate the scripting of objects with PowerShell for easier source control integration.

I thought this would be a little bit easier, but it looks like the SMO way of doing this is still fairly complicated. Maybe something I can look at simplifying for the project in a bit

If you want to get your database into source control but feel like it’s going to be a time-consuming challenge, this isn’t the time-consuming part.

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SQL On Docker And Running SQL Queries

Published 2017-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell loads SQL on Windows & Linux via Docker and shows how to run a query against it using Powershell:

In only a few seconds you have a SQL 2017 instance up and running (Take a look at Andrews blog at dbafromthecold.com for a great container series with much greater detail)

Now that we have our container we need to connect to it. We need to gather the IPAddress. We can do this using docker command docker inspect but I like to make things a little more programmatical. This works for my Windows 10 machine for Windows SQL Containers. There are some errors with other machines it appears but there is an alternative below

Read the whole thing.

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Using Powershell To Write To A File

Published 2017-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Bertram shows how to write to a file using Powershell:

Set-Content is one of those core PowerShell cmdlets that I can’t do without. I still remember using VBscript before we could use PowerShell to write to a file. I remember always trying to remember what kind of object I needed to use and the method name. Was it FileSystemObject, FileObject or what? It was a pain! Also, even when I did recall the method name was CreateTextFile, I’d always forget to add True as the second argument.

Here’s an example of the monstrosity I’m talking about.

Click through to see how easy writing is with Powershell.

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Powershell Runtime Prompt

Published 2017-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire shows off a really cool Powershell prompt:

A few months back, dbatools wizard Fred created a prompt that was so awesome, I never had to use Measure-Commandagain. It was cool enough that a number of us ended up adopting it, so I figured I’d share.

Performance is important to us so that’s what the prompt is all about. Nothing fancy, just the current working directory and how long the command took to run.

The prompt shows how long the previous command took to run.  Click through for the code to do this.

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Finding AD Group Members With Powershell

Published 2017-10-25 by Kevin Feasel

Amy Herold has a quick script to find which Active Directory users are in particular AD groups:

There was something that popped up today that called for a PowerShell script and the Get-ADGroupMember cmdlet – get a list of users from a list of groups. Some users are in there more than once so this needs to be a distinct list, unless you are into manually cleaning up things like this, and then I will be sad for you. Because that is kinda sad.

I originally wrote a script with two arrays (one for the initial list and one for the de-duped list of users), but even though this is quick and dirty, that was a little too dirty. Enter the Group-Object cmdlet – it takes this list of names and groups them. No black magic this time. Just a cmdlet, that comes baked into PowerShell giving me what I need.

Click through for the script.

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