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Category: T-SQL Tuesday

Automatically Restoring Databases To Another Server

Published 2017-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Bjorn Peters needs to migrate a few databases over to a test server nightly:

My first thoughts about that were creating a SQL Server Agent Job with following steps:

  1. check the availability of Shared-Destination-Folder
  2. delete/clear Destination-Folder-Content
  3. Shrink all Transaction-Logfiles
  4. Backup all Databases from given list
  5. Restore each Backup-File from folder
  6. Check all orphaned user
  7. delete/clear Destination-Folder-Content

A year or two ago, I had built this with a lot of normal T-SQL-Agent-Jobs, now I’m doing this with dbatools which make it very easy and fast (and in one step)

It’s only a few lines of Powershell code, which you can see upon clicking through.

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Comparing Server Configurations With Powershell

Published 2017-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy shows how to use a dbatools cmdlet, Get-DbaSpConfigure:

I started with Get-DbaSpConfigure to retrieve the settings available from sp_configureas these were the most important to my comparison. I ran this against production as well as each of my test instances and saved the results of each to a variable. Because accessing my production instance requires either jumping through hoops or using SQL Authentication, I passed -SqlCredential (get-credential -Message "Prod" -UserName MySQLLogin) so I’d be prompted for that password instead of using Windows Authentication.

It’s good to have an automated process in place to script comparisons, either against a known good build or across servers which ought to be the same.  Things that ought to be the same often aren’t.

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Getting Fancier With VM Creation

Published 2017-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Raul Gonzalez shows how to spin up a Hyper-V VM using Powershell:

There are a lots of command to create or manipulate VM’s and I’m still only scratching the surface, but although I’m not a PS person, I have to admit that every time I want to do something, I find relatively easy to find a powershell command or a script for it, so I like it.

For instance, creating new virtual machines it’s a simple as one command

New-VM

And that’s only the beginning, we can add the different virtual hardware like in the UI, Drives, Network Adapters and so on. And then configure memory, CPU and NUMA, etc…

This is the script which I’m more or less running to create my VM’s, this in particular will be a Hyper-V Host itself, so there are a couple of interesting settings I’ll tell you about later.

Click through for Raul’s script.

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Checking Availability Group Status With Powershell

Published 2017-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano shows off a script which checks Availability Group status of selected servers:

My favorite thing to automate using PowerShell is checking on the status of things on multiple servers.  For example, after patching your environment running a quick query to make sure the version number is the same.  In this example, we will use a cmdlet my coworker wrote in combination in my cmdlet to check the health of all the Availability Groups across our landscape or you could use it just check one.  After all I do consider myself to be an HA/DR nut.

I’ve blogged about my coworker’s Get-CmsHost cmdlet before but now he has and shared it on github so you can read more about here.

In my cmdlet I use the same code that used in the SSMS AG dashboard to check the status of my Availability Groups.

Tracy includes her cmdlet as well as several example calls.

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Powershell And CMS

Published 2017-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson loves Powershell and he loves Central Management Servers and he loves combining the two:

Get-CmsHosts is a function I wrote as part of a custom PowerShell module we maintain internally at my employer. It is simple to use, but is the base of most automation projects I work on.

Simple Example

PS> Get-CmsHosts -SqlInstance 'srv-' -CmsInstance srv-mycms-01

This example will connect to srv-mycms-01 and return a distinct list of instance host names registered with that CMS server that start with the string srv-. This output can then be piped to other commands:

Read on for more examples and details, and then grab the script at the end of Mark’s post.

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Disabling Named Pipes Using Powershell

Published 2017-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brian Carrig shows how to disable the Named Pipes protocol using Powershell:

Windows and POSIX systems both support something referred to as “named pipes”, although they are different concepts. For the purposes of this post I am referring only to the Windows version. By default on most editions of SQL Server (every edition except Express Edition), there are three supported and enabled protocols for SQL server to listen on – Shared Memory, TCP/IP and Named Pipes. The inclusion of named pipes has always confused me somewhat. In theory, named pipes allow communication between applications without the overhead of going through the network layer. This advantage disappears when you want to communicate over the network using named pipes. In all modern versions of SQL Server, named pipes does not support Kerberos, so for most shops you likely will not be using or should not be using named pipes to communicate with SQL Server.

Security best practices dictate that if you are not using a particular protocol, you should disable it. There is an option to disable this is in the GUI in Configuration Manager but since this T-SQL Tuesday blog post is about using Powershell it does not make sense to cover it here. Nor is it particular easy to use the GUI to make a configuration change across hundreds of SQL instances. Unfortunately, I have not found a good way to make this change that does not involve using WMI, if anybody is aware of a better method, I welcome your feedback.

Read the whole thing.  You should have Named Pipes enabled if you’re running a NetBIOS network.  But because it’s not 1997 anymore, you probably shouldn’t be running a NetBIOS network.

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Spinning Up Hyper-V VMs With Powershell

Published 2017-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shows us how to enable Hyper-V and create a Windows VM using Powershell:

I’m constantly spinning up VMs and then blowing them away. Ok, using the Hyper-V GUI isn’t too bad but when I’m creating multiple machines it can be a bit of a pain.

So here’s the details on the script I’ve written, hopefully it could be of some use to you too.

Click through for the script; it’s ultimately just a few lines of code.

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Deleting SSAS Cube Partitions With Powershell

Published 2017-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Richie Lee shows how to remove Analysis Services cube partitions using Powershell:

One such an example of ad-hoc DBA tasks was when I had to delete about 600 partitions from a measure group that had thousands of partitions. Doing this manually would be ridiculous, so at the time I created a SQL script that used some dynamic T-SQL to create the delete commands in XMLA. XMLA has no “delete if exist” type syntax, so if I needed to run this again, this dynamic SQL output wouldn’t work. And so I decided that if I had to run the same task a gain I would write a PowerShell script that would run DSC-style and drop the partitions that were no longer required. And funnily enough, that is exactly what I had to do.

I knew I would be able to create a Powershell script that used AMO to check if a partition exists and drop it if it did. I also wanted the script to take into account any other partitions in other measure groups that may also need to be dropped. So I made sure the script uses PowerShell switches that can be included when calling the function, and if they are included then the pertaining partitions in that measure group will be deleted. So you can run the script for one, some or all of the measure groups in a cube.

Click through for the script.

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Starting Out With Powershell

Published 2017-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell has his own introduction to Powershell:

PowerShell is another language, you are not going to be as proficient in a new language as you are in the language you spend all day working with. You will have to go through the learning curve and you will have to understand how to interpret errors. There is a learning curve just like with any language. Undoubtedly you will get frustrated at times. Reach out for help. Use twitter, use the #powershellhelp in the SQL Server Community Slack channel. There are many other places and plenty of people who will be glad to help you.

Rob has a pretty detailed introduction to the topic, so it’s well worth the read for new Powershell users.

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