Category: Powershell

Drew Furgiuele explains why he prefers not to use Invoke-SQLCmd and what he does instead:

I hope you’re wide awake and ready to get mad, because I have a very unpopular opinion regarding SQL Server and PowerShell: I don’t like using Invoke-SQLCmd . That’s not to say I haven’t used it; some of my older scripts on my GitHub use it but recently I have stopped. I think the cmdlet is of marginal use when compared to other methods to executing queries against a SQL Server database. Maybe you agree, but you probably don’t, so before you grab the torches and pitchforks and head to the comments, I encourage you to read on. It’s a little long, but I think it outlays my thoughts pretty well.

I think Drew makes a good point.  Read the whole thing.

Michael Bourgon shows how to kill an instance of SSMS using Powershell:

WMI in action!  I was running SSMS 2016 and it locked up on me.  So while I waited for it to become responsive I started up SSMS 2014. Still locked, but which do I kill in taskman? (The easy answer, is, of course: change the open query and then look in Applications, not Processes). I didn’t think of that, so used WMI.  You could also get fancy and figure out which is the oldest instance of SSMS and do it that way.

Pretty simple: Tell it the path (which is 130 for SSMS 2016), and kill that.

Click through for the script.  You can do more than just kill processes this way.  Think of a scenario in which you create a whitelist of valid processes and regularly check to see if anything outside that whitelist is running.  It’s a little more difficult to do than this script, but not that much tougher.

Chrissy LeMaire talks about the 25 new cmdlets in SQL Server’s Powershell module:

One of the best things about these cmdlets is that it makes failed jobs a whole lot easier to find. Note that SQL Server Management Studio 2016 does not have to be installed on the server — only your workstation. That’s because the cmdlet is built on top of SMO which is available in all versions of SQL Server since 2000.

As an aside, you may be wondering what a cmdlet is, and what’s the difference between a cmdlet and what you and I write. A cmdlet is a formally written PowerShell command that’s written in C#. I’ve never written one in my life. Instead, I write Functions. They’re both essentially the same, but a cmdlet is fancier on the back end.

Powershell is the present (not the future) for administration, so it’s nice to see the SQL Server team pushing themselves a bit when it comes to cmdlets.  They’ve a long way to go, but this is a nice step.

Michael Bourgon has a Powershell script to kill remote processes:

Simple problem: we had to replace the config files for an app that hits the database, pointing it at a CNAME.

However, the file could be in use because the app was running.  And the app only loads the file on startup.  So we came up with this, which worked quite well.  Note that we use WMI (see my other posts on it!) to grab the application info then a WMI method to terminate the app.

Click through for the script.