Category: Powershell

Chrissy LeMaire shows how to load SMO with full names when you don’t know which version is installed:

In a recent version of PowerShell, Publish-Module, which publishes modules to the Gallery began requiring fully qualified Assembly names such as “Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo, Version=$smoversion, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91”.

Previously, it was sufficient just to use short names such as Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo. This had similar behavior to LoadWithPartialName.

I get that LoadWithPartialName is sketchy, but the solution that Chrissy has to do seems overly complicated to me.  Nonetheless, those are the rules of the game now, I suppose.

Chrissy LeMaire explain the switch command in Powershell:

Even less code and makes total sense. Awesome. There’s even more to switch — the evaluations can get full on complex, so long as the evaluation ultimately equals $true. Take this example from sevecek. Well, his example with Klaas’ enhancement.

The refrain with switch is, always make sure you cover every case and don’t let cases fall through when you don’t intend them to.  Fortunately, Powershell doesn’t allow fallthrough, so that makes it easier.

Chrissy LeMaire has a pair of posts on runspaces.  First, a post which includes a runspace template:

Runspaces can be intimidating. I had heard about them, took a look at the code and was like “Ah, that looks complex. I’ll learn that later.” Because of this, I repeatedly went over the bulk insert code to familiarize the audience with the functionality that I was eventually going to multi-thread.

Then she shows us how to output results without waiting for all runspaces to complete:

Recently, I had a request to add multi-threading to Read-DbaBackupHeader. This was the first runspace in which I had to output the results from the runspace to the host — usually I just needed commands to run in the background, like with bulk-inserts to SQL Server.

Runspaces seems to be a good option in Powershell for multithreading.