If you’re anything like me, you’ve been bitten by the PowerShell bug and are using it among other automation sources to make you life in IT much more enjoyable. If this is not the case…you need to get started! There’s no time like the present, and a PowerShell New Year’s resolution should be something to …
I recently saw this link on using NoSQL with Windows. Now, I’m a SQL Server DBA, so I haven’t really had any reason to use NoSQL. I was curious about how easy it was going to be to set up and if I could get it working with PowerShell. I selected MongoDB from the list …
It’s been a long time (over 2 months) since I last posted. I’ll try to get back into a rhythm of posting at least weekly. Anyway, this is something that occurred to me at work when writing a script. I usually avoid nullable columns, but sometimes date fields make sense to be null (rather than …
Continue reading ‘Checking a Field for NULL in PowerShell’ »
Have you ever tracked down a bug, been confident that you had found the root of your problems, only to realize shortly afterwords that you missed it completely? What I posted yesterday as a bug in PowerShell (having to do with recursive functions, dot-sourcing, and parameters) seemed during my debugging session to clearly be a …
Continue reading ‘The PowerShell Bug That Wasn’t, and More Package Management’ »
UPDATE: I have worked out how the behavior described at the end of this post is not a bug, but in fact just PowerShell doing what it’s told. Don’t have time to explain right now, but I’ll write something up later today. I also worked out how to “fix” the behavior. For a long time …
Continue reading ‘Package Management and a PowerShell Bug’ »
The first module-based release of the SQL PowerShell Extensions (SQLPSX) was released recently on CodePlex. It features very handy wrappers for most of the SMO objects used to manipulate SQL Server metadata, SSIS packages, Replication, and (new in the 2.0 release) an ADO.NET module which I wrote based on the code in this post. There’s …
Continue reading ‘SQL PowerShell Extensions (SQLPSX) 2.0 Released’ »
Recently, we had an occasion to write a process to read event logs on several sql servers to try to determine login times for different sql and Windows logins. Since we have begun using PowerShell v2.0, and since get-eventlog now has a -computername parameter, it seemed like an obvious solution. The event message we were …
This isn’t so much a post as an extended pingback. This Post by Jeffrey Snover on the PowerShell Team Blog explains how to use the -expandproperty parameter of the select-object cmdlet. I had never noticed that parameter and was also annoyed by writing this all the time: It was an idiom that I was using …
When writing a “get-” function in PowerShell, you often run into the issue of filtering your data. Do you want to include any filtering parameters? Do you want to allow lists of values? Do you want to provide “include” or “exclude” parameters? What about wildcards? I got tired of writing the same kind of code …
If you’re like me, you hate to do the same thing over and over. That’s what programming is for, right? To handle automating tedious procedures? Unfortunately, it’s not at all appropriate to run off and build an app every time you need to do the same thing 3 times. If you try that, you’ll have …
Continue reading ‘A Handy Trick I’ve Started to Use a Lot’ »
