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Category: Powershell

Test File Existence Using Powershell

Published 2015-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shows us the Test-Path cmdlet:

One of the enhancements I wanted to make was check if the file exists, and if not, then download it. However, if it does exist, then I’ll skip the file. I know this means I don’t get updated files if schedules change, which is possible, but in that case, I can just delete the file from my desktop and go from there.

I made a quick search, and found a few links to the Test-Path cmdlet. Essentially you give this a file path and it returns true or false. Almost exactly what I need.

Test-Path is small but helpful, and a vital part of scripts which check files.

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PowerShell-Based Health Checks

Published 2015-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Omid Afzalalghom discusses an open-source tool using PowerShell to read various DMVs and give you a basic health check:

PowerShell is an ideal tool for doing health-checks of a collection of SQL Server instances, and there are several examples around, but few acknowledge the fact that individual DBAs have their own priorities for tests, and need something easily changed to suit circumstances. Omid’s Healthcheck allows tests to be SQL or PowerShell and requires only adding, altering or deleting files in directories.

Grab the tool from his GitHub repo.

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Speed Up SQLPS Load Time

Published 2015-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Shawn Melton shows us how to make SQLPS load a bit faster, and which comes with the obligatory warning:

WARNING: You are modifying the files at your own risk. You have been warned.

If you are not familiar with the files involved with a module, you can read more on that here. The file I found most interesting is the “SqlPsPostScript.PS1” file, located in the SQLPS module folder for the given version of SQL Server:

Check it out.  Those two seconds you save add up over time.

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SQL Agent Reporting

Published 2015-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Fal shows us how to use Powershell and T-SQL to get SQL Agent job status:

This is effective, but I struggle a little with the SQL query. It’s good, but suffers from the structure of the jobs tables in MSDB. We have to account for that and it makes the SQL query a little convoluted. It would be helpful if we could reference a simple data set like the Job Activity Monitor in SSMS.

Of course, this is a leading question on my part. There is a way to do this and it is by leveraging the SQL Server Management Objects (SMO). This .Net library is the API interface for working with SQL Server and is what SSMS is built on. Because it is a .Net library, we can also access it through Powershell.

SMO’s a powerful thing.

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