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Category: Powershell

Start-Demo With Multi-Line Commands

Published 2016-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell has an update to the Start-Demo cmdlet, making it no longer require backticks when running multi-line commands:

Start-Demo was written in 2007 by a fella who knows PowerShell pretty well 🙂 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2007/03/03/start-demo-help-doing-demos-using-powershell/

It was then updated in 2012 by Max Trinidad http://www.maxtblog.com/2012/02/powershell-start-demo-now-allows-multi-lines-onliners/

This enabled support for multi-line code using backticks at the end of each line. This works well but I dislike having to use the backticks in foreach loops, it confuses people who think that they need to be included and to my mind looks a bit messy

I’m going to need to look into Start-Demo; I’m not sure I’ve seen it before.

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Azure SQL Database Alerts With Powershell

Published 2016-08-24 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Fal shows how to create Azure SQL Database alerts using Powershell:

So let’s get down to brass tacks and actually create an alert. To do this, we need some info first:

  • The Resource Group we will create the alert in.

  • An Azure location where the alert will live.

  • An Azure SQL Database server and database we are creating the alert for.

  • What metric we will monitor and what is the threshold we will be checking.

  • (optional) An email to send an alert to.

Mike follows this up with code and shows it’s not scary at all to create these alerts from within Powershell.

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Find And Replace In Powershell

Published 2016-08-19 by Kevin Feasel

Richie Lee has a Powershell snippet to replace text:

Below is a function that will search in  a string and replace a character in a variable. Simple enough. It generally saves time in calling this from a helper file in source control for tidying up variables that are passed in to a Powershell function that aren’t quite formatted as required. A good example of this is upstream build variables with spaces in TeamCity.

Click through for the script.

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Powershell All The Things

Published 2016-08-19 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad reports that Microsoft is making Powershell a cross-platform language:

This is PowerShell Core only, Alpha Version 6.0.0.9 and there’s a lot of work to do. Bugs and feedback are been submitted as the community are contributing for it success.

This version is also available for Windows 10 / Server 2016 and Windows 8.1 / Server 2012 R2. You can have it side-by-side with the current version of PowerShell.

Max has notes on how to install it on Ubuntu.  Given that Microsoft is bringing Bash to Windows and Powershell to Linux, these are interesting times.

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Introduction To Powershell

Published 2016-08-18 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Tharp is starting to learn Powershell:

PowerShell is developed by Microsoft, specifically for task automation and configuration management.  A shell is a user interface that gives the user access to services of an operating system.  The shell you are likely most familiar with is the Command Prompt.  PowerShell is like the Command Prompt in many ways, but it is much more powerful.

PowerShell is based on the .Net framework and is considered a scripting language.  Windows also developed the Windows PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment).  This is a GUI that lets us make scripts without having to type all of the commands into the command line.

I highly recommend learning Powershell if you’re in the Windows administration space.  It’s not quite as useful on the development side (where you can quickly throw together a .NET app) but it’s great for scripting out those admin tasks.

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Checking For Credentials

Published 2016-08-18 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry uses a try-catch block to figure out if you can authenticate automatically and prompts you otherwise:

Runbooks are very powerful tools which allow you to automate PowerShell commands which need to be run at different times.  One of the problems that I’ve run across when dealing with Azure Runbooks is that there is no way to use the same script on prem during testing and the same script when deploying. This is because of the way that authentication has to be handled when setting up a runbook.

The best way to handle authentication within a runbook is to store the authentication within the Azure Automation configuration as a stored credential.  The problem here is that you can’t use this credential while developing your runbook in the normal Powershell ISE.

This is a clever idea.

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SQLPS Is Dead; Long Live SQLPS

Published 2016-08-17 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Fal thought he had escaped his SQLPS nightmare:

The second issue is that even if you do install SSMS 2016, SQL Agent won’t recognize and give you access to the new module if you use a PowerShell job step. When you create a PowerShell job step, the script in that job step runs within a specific context. It’s hidden from you, but whenever that script runs the first thing that happens is SQL Server launchessqlps.exe.

Check out the links Mike provides to Connect items and the Trello board if you want to see the issues he brought up fixed.

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Load Testing Analysis Services

Published 2016-08-16 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Anton provides Powershell code to load test Analysis Services cubes:

One of the more time consuming pieces in this process is step 4 – setting up a solution that can generate a concurrent query workload. Bob Duffy (b | t) has written blogs and delivered presentations on the topic of Analysis Services load testing. However, when it comes to tooling (unless something changed recently) I believe he’s still using a custom .NET Visual Studio Test solution for the test harness. And unless you know .NET, you’re going to have a pretty difficult time getting setup… which is why I was so happy when, earlier this year, Chris Schmidt (b | t) wrote a post over on MSDN demonstrating a method for load testing an Analysis Services database using PowerShell.

This weekend I finally had some time to expand upon Chris’ code sample and add several new features… e.g. parameters (target server/database, level of concurrency, queries per batch, etc) and the ability to retrieve MDX (or DAX) queries from a SQL table. In my experience, it’s quite a bit easier to generate a table of MDX/DAX queries rather than a bunch of txt files with a query in each file.

My first thought was “Well, that doesn’t seem too complicated.”  Which means that Bill did a great job.

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DacFx Wrapper

Published 2016-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott has a new Powershell module named DacFxed:

There is a solution? Well yes of course otherwise I wouldn’t have been writing this! DacFxed is a powershell module which:

  • 1. References the DacFx nuget package so updating to the latest version is simple
  • 2. Implements a hack (ooh) to allow contributors to be loaded from anywhere
  • 3. Is published to the powershell gallery so to use it you just do “Install-Module -Name DacFxed -Scope User -Force”
  • 4. Has a Publish-Database, New-PublishProfile and Get-DatabaseChanges CmdLets

Cool right, now a couple of things to mention. Firstly this is of course open source and available: https://github.com/GoEddie/DacFxed

This is a nice tool to deploy dacpac files using Powershell.  Check out the GitHub repo for more details.

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Deploying SSAS Cubes Using Powershell

Published 2016-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Richie Lee has a Powershell script to deploy an Analysis Services cube:

Recently someone got in touch with me about one of my earliest posts. I realised I had made a mistake on that post and had updated. But I also realised that the script itself is actually part of a PowerShell module. So wanting to make things as easy as possible, and being the helpful guy that I am, I have altered that example into a script which I am posting here.

It’s worth stressing that the errors that output to the console are fairly generic, and that there is a log file that will contain all the information if there are any errors.

Sadly, you still need to write/tweak the big glob of XML, it seems.

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