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Category: Powershell

Dealing With Newlines In Reports

Published 2017-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill shows how to deal with newlines in data:

I have mentioned before that we can use CHAR(10) and CHAR(13) for new lines and carriage returns in SQL Server so I’ll leave it up to an exercise to the reader to create a table with these “troublesome” bits of information in them (plus if you came here from Google, I assume you already have a table with them in it).

For me, I’ve just created a single table dbo.NewLineNotes that has a single entry with a new line in it.

Read on for more.

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Powershell Pattern Matching

Published 2017-07-19 by Kevin Feasel

Klaas Vandenberghe shows some of the pattern matching and regular epxression functionality within Powershell:

This is like grep if you ever encountered that. The Select-String cmdlet finds a -pattern in text.
It has an -allmatches switch to … guess what 🙂

Get-ChildItem D:\Myscripts -File -Recurse *.sql | Select-String -pattern "drop\s+[?(database|table|login)"

will get us all our sql scripts in which we drop a database, table or login.
The returned MatchInfo object holds the matching parts of the script text, and also the name of the file and the line number where the match was found.

Get-ChildItem | Select-String is my most frequently used Powershell pipeline.

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Collecting Processes During High-CPU Events

Published 2017-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Laerte Junior has a job which captures processes when server CPU is high:

Whatever the query you prefer to use, the big question will be how to do it in real time when the problem is actually happening, and log whatever information you need, even on the unattended server. There are plenty of times you need to do this, especially if you don’t have a full-time DBA or if you are running in the cloud and needs some support from the cloud provider. You can help the support Engineer by sending him the queries that are breaking your system. In AWS, this kind of service is out of scope of support, but if you have luck to find an Engineer that knows SQL Server and is willing to help you, as I was, it will, help him or her to help you to tune the queries. You just need to leave the solution and then get the CSV log with the queries.

If you can’t get a monitoring solution in place and have to roll your own, this is a very good piece of the puzzle.

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Executing Powershell In SSIS

Published 2017-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Calbimonte shows how to execute Powershell via C# in SQL Server Integration Services:

Get started

The article will include the following topics:

  1. Get the list of services using PowerShell in C#.

  2. How to send SSIS Parameters to PowerShell using the script task.

  3. How to use the PowerShell.addscript function.

  4. How to invoke a PowerShell script in C#

I think this is a fairly limited scenario—if you’re going to have to write C# code anyhow, you can do this same work in C#.  I suppose that it would be most useful in cases where you have to call common Powershell cmdlets rather than writing your own .NET code.

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ADO.Net In Powershell Core

Published 2017-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad shows how to use Powershell Core on Windows or Linux to run T-SQL queries:

There’s a catch!

Nothing is perfect yet! Using the .NET Core version of System.Data, there’s a known issue with the datarow class. It seems it’s building the data results as string list of values without the column information.

But, there’s always a way to make thing work adding some extra code to work around this issue and reconstruct the data the way we want.

Max points out a couple of issues that exist today, but they’re getting resolved.

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Copying Databases With dbatools

Published 2017-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Robbins has a video showing how to copy databases from several SQL Server instances using dbatools:

The video starts out by checking the default instance of SQL Server on a server named SQL17 to see if any user databases exist. Then the names of five different SQL Servers are piped to ForEach-Object. Within the ForEach-Object loop, $_ is a variable for the current object. It’s translated to each individual server name as it iterates through the list of SQL Servers, copying the user databases to SQL17. Only one user database exists on each of the source SQL Servers. The databases are backed up to the specified network share and restored to the destination server. The network share and any sub-folders that are specified must already exist. The account that SQL Server runs as on each of the servers must also have access to the network share. The names of the SQL Servers used in the demo correspond to the version of SQL Server they’re running. The SQL05 server is running Windows Server 2008 (non-R2) and does not have any version of PowerShell installed which means the Copy-SqlDatabase function is extremely versatile.

Click through to watch the video and see how quickly you can get going.

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Deploying Reporting Services Reports With Powershell

Published 2017-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Claudio Silva has a post covering Reporting Services Powershell cmdlets:

In this post I will share with you the request and how I have automated it saving a lot of time. Just to keep you interested, I went from 23 and a half minutes to 3 (your mileage may vary depending on the number of objects/actions that you need to do).

The request

  1. Create new folder “FolderB”

  2. We need to deploy a copy of the reports and data source to a new folder (“FolderB”). You should get the existing ones from the folder “FolderA” on the same server.

  3. Then you have to change the datasource to point to the database “dbRS” with the login “ReportingUser”

  4. Finally we need to change the data source for each report to match the new datasource pointing to database “dbRS” created on last step.

Click through for the code.  Claudio even has a one-minute video showing his work in action.

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Using SMO On Linux

Published 2017-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Richie Lee explains how to get the SQL Tool Service running on Linux:

So, to briefly sum up, to use SMO on Linux, you need to do the following:

  • Install .NET Core 2.0
  • Install PowerShell beta 2
  • Install SQL Tool Service

You can use PowerShell from the Terminal, but I prefer something like an IDE so this is optional:

  • Download Visual Studio Code

  • Install PowerShell plugin

  • Change settings file to point explicitly to PowerShell beta 2.

Read the whole thing.

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Integrating dbatools Into VSCode

Published 2017-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shows how to integrate dbatools Powershell commands into Visual Studio Code:

The first dbatools commands that I looked at are: –

These commands do exactly what they say on the tin. Pretty standard stuff for DBAs but what’s cool is how we can use Visual Studio Code to quickly and easily check that all our databases are being backed up and have a recent (good) CHECK DB.

I’m going to setup two scripts to run the dbatools commands against my SQL instances via Visual Studio Code Tasks.

Read on to see how Andrew did it.

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Checking For Instant File Initialization

Published 2017-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Klaas Vandenberghe shows how to use Powershell to determine whether Instant File Initialization is turned on:

Sometimes we want to apply a filter to an array or other collection of objects, but keep both the items that pass the filter and those that fail it. Instead of cycling twice through the collection, there’s a one-step method.

Instant File Initialization is a privilege assigned in the local security policy. Here’s some explanation by MSSQL Tiger Team.
There’s a lot to tell about it, but I’m not going to do that here. Let’s just assume it’s a good thing to assign that privilege to the account with which the SQL Service runs.

Klaas explains how to use Powershell filtering with Where-Object and the Where method for people new to Powershell, and then uses this to figure out if IFI is enabled.

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