Category: Powershell

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.

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.

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

The first dbatools commands that I looked at are: –

• Get-LastGoodCheckDb
• Get-LastBackup

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.

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.