Category: Powershell

Wayne Sheffield has a Powershell script to generate SQL Saturday SpeedPASSes:

My good friend, Mr. Google, found this post by Kendal Van Dyke. This post has a PowerShell script that will download and merge all of the PDFs for selected attendees into one big PDF. This enables printing out all of the SpeedPASSes at once, instead of one-by-one. However, I have a couple of problems with this script in it’s current form. First, the instructions for how to get the information from the SQLSaturday admin site have changed (they did do a major web site change last year). Secondly, it downloads all of the PDFs one-by-one, and puts them into a temporary directory, where they are all merged together. In file-name order. Not alphabetically. This means that the manual sorting is still necessary. But hey – it’s PowerShell. Surely we can come up with a way to do this sorting for us!

So I decided to re-write this script to suit my needs. Kendal’s script downloads the SpeedPASS PDF files one-by one. However, the admin site allows us to download all of them in one zip file. I like this approach better. I ended up making two major changes to the script. The first change requires pre-downloading and extracting all of the SpeedPASSes files. The second change is to get them to merge alphabetically. Like Kendal’s script, this uses the PDFSharp assemblies. This requires using PowerShell 3.0 or higher.

Click through for the script, which is probably very helpful if you ever run a SQL Saturday event.

Rob Sewell shows how to use dbatools to create test user accounts quickly:

Of course we can use any source for our users – a database, an excel file, Active Directory or even just type them in.

We can use the Add-SQLLogin command from the sqlserver module to add our users as SQL Logins, but at present we cannot add them as database users and assign them to a role.

Rob includes a demo script as well, thereby making it even easier.

Jana Sattainathan shows how easy it is to change the colors for Powershell warnings and errors:

How could such a nice tool have such a terrible choice of colors for errors and warnings? I am talking about the ISE and the unreadable contrast of colors.

You can fix it. Open and update your profile by running this from your ISE (which opens your profile in NotePad)

It’s Powershell, so you can do it in a couple lines.

Jana Sattainathan shows how to open a specific Powershell ISE tab without moving your hands off the keyboard:

This is a function that activates a tab based on a partial search string that you type in the CLI portion of the ISE. Among the numerous tabs you have open in the ISE, to activate a tab that has the word “register”, you would just type in

1	popt register

That’s it. The tab that has the word “register” will become active.

Why “popt” instead of a standard name?

“popt” is the alias you can create for the real “search and activate function” Pop-FileInISETab. It stands for “poptab”. You don’t want to trade one problem with another by having to type that long name, so, there is functionality to optionally create an alias named “popt” for the function.

At first I said to myself, “Why would anybody have this many tabs open?”  Then I looked at my instance of SQL Server Management Studio.  Then I decided I wanted this for SSMS.

Sander Stad has made changes to his Export-DMVInformation Powershell module:

Changes:

1. Possibility to execute the module using the pipeline

2. Get all the databases in one statement by assigning the value “ALL” to the database parameter.

3. Replaced messages with verbose

Read on for more information, including where you can get the module and its Export-DMVInformation cmdlet.