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Category: Powershell

Powershell And Python

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad mixes two powerful scripting languages:

For this section we previously installed the python module pyodbc which is needed to connect via ODBC to any SQL Server on the network giving the proper authentication method.

The following sample code can be found this link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/developer-get-started/python-ubuntu

This is probably more useful in larger shops with multiple operations personnel covering different domains, but it’s nice to know that both languages play nice.

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Finding Relational Data Sources In SSAS

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard builds a Powershell script to figure out which relational database servers feed data to which Analysis Services cubes:

Whenever you are introduced to a new environment, either because you visit a new client or take over a new position from someone else, it’s always crucial to get on top of what’s going on. More often than not, any documentation (if you are lucky to even get hands on that) is out of date or not properly maintained. So going through that may even end up making you even more confused – or in worst case; misinformed.

In a previous engagement of mine came a request from the Data Architecture team. I was asked to produce a list of all servers and cubes running in a specific environment. They provided the list of servers and wanted to know which servers were hit by running solutions. Along with this information the team also needed all sorts of information on the connection strings from the Data Source Views, as well as which credentials were used, if possible.

If you’re dealing with a large number of cubes, this becomes even more useful.

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Buffer Pool TreeMap

Published 2016-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson has a post on using Powershell to visualize contents in the buffer pool:

On Monday Chrissy LeMaire & I Did a session called “SQL Server Cmdlets and Community Involvement” for the PowerShell 10 Year Anniversary all-day event on Channel9 on MSDN. If you jump to the 18 minutes 30 second mark of that video you’ll see me showing how to look at the Buffer Pool of your SQL Server instance, first with the Out-GridView cmdlet, then I used a function from PowerShell MVP Boe Prox ( b | t ) called Out-SquarifiedTreeMap like so:

Read on to get a link to the code.

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Get-DbaTcpPort

Published 2016-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones looks at one Powershell function inside dbatools:

I like using PoSh for some tasks, especially when I don’t have an easy way to do something in SSMS or want to run a task across a variety of instances. In this case, as I glanced through the September updates, I found a good one.

Get-DbaTcpPort

I don’t love the mixed naming, and I’ll get used to it, but I do love the autocomplete in PoSh.

Steve has lots of screenshots walking you through this function.

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Powershell Cmdlets For SSRS

Published 2016-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson reports that there are now Powershell cmdlets for SQL Server Reporting Services:

I have been testing these commands for several weeks and so far my favorite command is Write-RsFolderContent because it will allows you to write the .RDL & .RSD files from a directory on your machine to your SSRS folder. Like the whole thing. You don’t have to throw it into a loop or anything. Try it out!

This is a wonderful replacement for the old RSScripter app (of which I still have a copy squirreled away somewhere).

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SQLite With Powershell

Published 2016-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Factor combines SQLLite, Powershell, and SQL Server:

 Although I dearly love using SQL Server, I wouldn’t use it in every circumstance; there are times, for example, when just isn’t necessary to use a Server-based RDBMS for a data-driven application. The open-source SQLite is arguably the most popular and well-tried-and-tested database ever. It is probably in your phone, and used by your browser. Your iTunes will use it. Most single-user applications that need to handle data will use SQLite because it is so reliable and easy to install.

It is specifically designed as a zero-configuration, embedded, relational database with full ACID compliance, and a good simple dialect of SQL92. The SQLite library accesses its storage files directly, using a single library, written in C, which contains the entire database system. Creating a SQLite database instance is as easy as opening a simple cross-platform file that contains the entire database instance. It requires no administration.

There’s a lot going on in this interesting article; I recommend giving it a read.

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Visualizing Checkins

Published 2016-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell uses Power BI to map where he’s been:

I am using the swarm API but the principle is the same for any other API that provides you with data. For example, I used the same principles to create the embedded reports on the PASS PowerShell Virtual Chapter page showing the status of the cards suggesting improvements to the sqlserver module for the product team to work on. Hopefully, this post will give you some ideas to work on and show you that it is quite easy to get excellent data visualisation from APIs

First up we need to get the data. I took a look at the Swarm developers page ( The Trello ishere by the way) I had to register for an app, which gave me a client id and a secret. I then followed the steps here to get my user token I was only interested in my own check ins so I used the steps under Token flow Client applications to get my access token which I used in an URL like this.

This post includes some Powershell and quite a few animated GIFs, making it easy to follow.

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Automated Emails

Published 2016-10-25 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Tharp shows how to send automated e-mails with Powershell:

The update has two parts: how I feel about my work and how I feel about my department.  For each of these, I wrote a few ‘beginning’ sentences and a few ‘ending’ sentences.  The script picks a random beginning and ending sentence for each category (work and department), color codes it, and sends the email to my personal and my work emails.

I love the randomization.

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Automatic Variables In Powershell

Published 2016-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Constantine Kokkinos has a list of automatic variables in Powershell:

Been a few days of learning since I last wrote one of these, but I have come back to the automatic variables page on the PowerShell documentation enough times that I think I should just blog the important parts for myself.

  • $? – TRUE/FALSE if the last thing you did succeeded.

  • $_ – Something everyone uses in posh, current pipeline object.

  • $Args – all the undeclared params passed to a function, try to avoid.

  • $Error – the array of error objects that represent a stack of the most recent errors. use $Errors0 to get the most recent error.

Read on for more variables.

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Parallel PoshRSJob Template

Published 2016-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Cody Konior walks through using PoshRSJob with a custom function:

Recently I migrated from my own runspace module to Boe Prox’s PoshRSJob which is pretty much perfect. But today I wanted to share how to integrate PoshRSJob cleanly into your functions through a default -Parallel parameter and using a template.

You can very easily modify this for your own purposes however it’s even more awesome as-is if you run parallelised tests for one major input (like a computer name) but where additional information might also be passed in through object properties on a pipeline (I’ll explain why you’d want to do that later in the post). Here’s what it looks like:

Read on for code and explanation.  Powershell parallelism is something that I’ve never been good at, so hopefully this makes it easier for me…

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