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Category: Powershell

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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Powershell’s Switch Statement

Published 2017-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill shows us Powershell’s switch statement:

We send out notification emails if jobs fail as well but hey, we’re DBAs, we like a backup!

Since this used to be done manually, and since I like PowerShell, I created separate functions that can take individual log files and parse out the needed data in a nice, easy format.

My problem, and the reason for this post, was figuring out, based on the name of the file in a directory, which function to call…

Click through to see how to use the switch statement, as well as how to switch on an expression.

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Checking If UseLargeFRS Is Enabled

Published 2017-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Cody Konior has a quick post showing how to see if you have the UseLargeFRS switch turned on for your SQL Server disks:

PureStorage has a pretty cool post that mentions the importance of formatting SQL Server disks with a 64KB clusters and the /L flag (also known as the UseLargeFRS switch on PowerShell’s Format-Volume cmdlet).

Why UseLargeFRS? It’s to help avoid DBCC CHECKDB failures on large/busy databases. But how do you work out whether it’s enabled or not? PowerShell to the rescue!

You can’t work this out remotely but you can do it locally.

Read on for the script.

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Installing dbatools

Published 2017-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire has a good walkthrough on how to install a module from the Powershell gallery, using dbatools as an example:

It’s easy for PowerShell toolmakers to forget that new users may have questions about ExecutionPolicy and Repositories. If dbatools is the first module you’ve ever installed and used, this guide is intended to help you with all of your install/setup questions and concerns.

In order to emulate what your experience may be like, I spun up a fresh Windows 10 instance in Azure and went through all of the required steps which include addressing:

  • Setting the Execution Policy

  • Explicitly trusting Microsoft’s PowerShell Gallery repository

  • Installing dbatools

  • Explicitly trusting dbatools as a Publisher, before first use

If you’ve never installed dbatools before, Chrissy shows just how easy it can be.

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