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Category: Powershell

BACPACs In Azure

Published 2016-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Fal uses Powershell to import and export Azure SQL Database data:

What makes this black voodoo magic work? Is this some proprietary technique Microsoft has snuck in on us? Surprisingly, this is a bit of technology that have existed for sometime now as part of SQL Server Data Tools called BACPACs. A BACPAC is essentially a logical backup of a database, storing the schema and data as SQL statements.

This differs from a typical SQL Server backup, which stores your database pages directly in a binary format. Because of this, native backups are smaller and can be made/restored faster. However, they are more rigid, as you can only restore a native backup in specific scenarios. A logical backup, since it is a series of SQL statements, can be more flexible.

Mike’s going to follow up with a way to take advantage of this to migrate normal SQL Server databases, so that should be interesting as well.

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Dave Mason Interviews Chrissy LeMaire

Published 2016-05-19 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason recently interviewed Chrissy LeMaire on topics Powershell:

[Dave]: It’s natural to have bias toward the tools and technology we know, which can lead to spirited debate. Most of the time, it’s friendly and thoughtful. I’ve been getting a sense of “us and them” regarding T-SQL vs PowerShell. Do you get that sense too?

[Chrissy]: Yes, which has been pretty surprising to me. As a PowerShell MVP, it sometimes feels like fellow DBAs may see me as an invader of SQL territory, when in fact, I’ve been a DBA for 17 of the 20 years that I’ve been in IT. I even updated my Twitter profile to make it clear that I’ve been a SQL Server DBA since 1999. I believe this issue will resolve itself as DBAs begin to see how PowerShell can make their jobs way easier. I’m also hoping that mySQL Server Migration script, which has no T-SQL (or even C#) equivalent, will be as persuasive as it is useful.

I remember reading an article in SQL Server Magazine back around 2002 that made the case for DBAs to learn T-SQL and other scripting languages. My first thought was “Wait, there are DBAs that don’t know T-SQL?” I always thought T-SQL was part of the job description, and it’s the same now with PowerShell. This belief was further enforced by the fact that when I was getting started with PowerShell and SQL, Simple Talk’s Phil Factor and Laerte Junior already had a ton of stuff out there and a few books about SQL Server and PowerShell had already been written. I thought I was late to the party.

This is a fun read; check it out.

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Creating An ETL Process In Powershell

Published 2016-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad is building a Powershell-based solution for ETL from scratch:

So after the drive gets mapped to T: drive, we need to look and collect the type of logs we want to pull. In my scenario, I’m looking for all log labeled “*.Events.*.log.*”. One caveat discovered previously, these text logs file doesn’t contains servername information. But, No Problem! This is another opportunity to be creative with PowerShell.

Here we use the Cmdlet “Get-ChildItem” with the “Sort-Object” to sort the results by its object property “LastWriteTime“. You will file this property very useful later as you progress in our data collection process. This results set wil need to be stored in PowerShell Object

I’m interested in seeing where this goes, especially because my first choice for ETL would be SSIS with Biml.

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Restoring Azure SQL Databases With Powershell

Published 2016-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Fal shows us how to restore an Azure SQL Database database using Powershell:

The most fundamental form of disaster recovery is database backups and restores. Typically setting up backups is a lot of work. DBAs need to make sure there’s enough storage available for backups, create schedules that accommodate business operations and support RTOs and RPOs, and implement jobs that execute backups according to those schedules. On top of that, there is all the work that has to be done when backups fail and making sure disk capacity is always large enough. There is a huge investment that must be made, but it is a necessary one, as losing a database can spell death for a company.

This is one of the HUGE strengths of Azure SQL Database. Since it a service offering, Microsoft has already built out the backup infrastructure for you. All that stuff we talked about in the previous paragraph? If you use Azure SQL Database, you do not have to do any of it. At all.

What DBAs still need to manage is being able to restore databases if something happens. This is where Powershell comes into play. While we can definitely perform these actions using the portal, it involves a lot of clicking and navigation. I would much rather run a single command to run my restore.

The Powershell cmdlets are easy to use, so spin up an instance and give it a try.

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Beware Manually Edited SQLPS Files

Published 2016-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Cody Konior makes mention of an issue if you’ve manually edited your SqlPSPostscript.ps1 file:

The SQLPS module has been slow to load for years now and has finally been fixed in the April 2016 release. But most of us couldn’t wait a few years and edited the SqlPSPostscript.ps1 file that sits in the module directory.

If you’ve done this on one of the SSMS previews (not SQL 2014 as it’s in a different directory) and then upgraded to the April preview though you’ll be missing something, two things actually, being aliases for the renamed Encode-SqlName and Decode-SqlName, which won’t get put into your modified SqlPSPostScript.ps1 file. And so if you use these your older scripts may break.

There’s an easy fix, though, so all’s well.

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Comparing Paths With Powershell

Published 2016-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Derik Hammer introduces us to Join-Path:

It is obvious that the Join-Path method is easier to remember and faster to type. I use this method every time that I compare paths, even if they are full paths with file names.

The output of the Join-Path cmdlet can seem odd when using full paths but the comparison still functions properly.

This is pretty neat. The normal use of Join-Path is to combine a path with a filename to create a file path, but I like this usage of the cmdlet.

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Remote Server Installation Using Powershell

Published 2016-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin gives tips on using Powershell and task scheduler to schedule remote SQL Server installations:

Finally I’ve nailed down that topic and hopefully that will be my last post dedicated to SQL Server installations on Windows Core.

In this post I will show how it is easy to install SQL Server from a remote computer without remoting to a server, without any GUI, just by using simple command line.

I admit that setting up installation as a scheduled task on the remote machine is not something that ever came to mind before.

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Azure SQL Database Management With Powershell

Published 2016-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Fal shows a few administration steps with Azure SQL Database, including resetting an admin password:

Walking through this, we just need to create a secure string for our password and then use the Set-AzureRmSqlServer cmdlet and pass the secure string to -SqlAdministratorPassword argument. Easy as that and we don’t even need to know what the previous password was. With this in mind, I also want to call out that you can only change the password and not the admin login name. While this is not such a big deal, be aware that once you have an admin login name, you are stuck with it.

Mike promises that his next blog post won’t take a month to publish.  Here’s hoping he’s right.

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Deploying Dacpacs

Published 2016-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Richie Lee shows two different methods of automating Dacpac deployment:

DacFx, or to give it it’s full title, the Data-tier Application Framework “is a component which provides application lifecycle services for database development and management for Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Databases“. Essentially, it is another method we can use to manage our Dacpacs. However instead of using the external process SQLPackage and initiating it via cmdline you can use C# or PowerShell to manage Dacpacs. In fact, SQLPackage uses the “Microsoft.SqlServer.Dac.dll” itself. You can verify this by going and deleting the dll and trying to run sqlpackage via command line…. or you can just take my word for it.

Read on for the Powershell script Richie uses.

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