PSPowerHour v1.0 Wrap-Up

Andy Levy
dbatools, powershell, speaking
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The first edition of the PSPowerHour is in the books and it looks like it was a big success. This one was dbatools-heavy but I chalk that up to the dbatools community having lots of free time because we’ve automated so many of our tasks :)

Overall Impressions

I signed in about half an hour ahead of the webcast and was the first one there. Shortly thereafter, I was joined by Michael Lombardi (twitter, then Jess Pomfret (blog|twitter) and Chrissy LeMaire (blog|twitter). After ironing out a few glitches, we got everyone in the right place and kicked off the broadcast. Everything ran very smoothly, especially considering the number of people involved - Michael and Warren F. (blog|twitter) did a terrific job of orchestrating everything.

While watching and listening to Chrissy, Doug, Andrew & Jess give their demos, I ran through my own in my head a couple times, adding and rearranging a few things as I observed how they were doing theirs. The big dilemma for me was whether or not to run the camera or exclusively screen share (I ended up going with the screen share only). Having not rehearsed my demo enough in the weeks leading up to the event, I was still not sure where to dip into more detail or dial things back and seeing what others were doing helped quite a bit. Having familiar faces & voices ahead of me in the queue put my nerves to rest.

I wasn’t able to watch the sessions after mine in their entirety due to family commitments. Joshua’s Burnt Toast module looks like it’ll be fun to experiment with and add some nice functionality to scripts (I got to see about half of his demo), and I’m really looking forward to catching a replay of Daniel’s demo of PowerShell on the Raspberry Pi - I didn’t realize that it had been ported already!

My Demo

I demoed Invoke-DbaSqlQuery and why one should use it over Invoke-SQLCmd - primarily for protection from SQL injection. Things didn’t go exactly the way I’d practiced; I ran short of time despite feeling like I rushed things and cutting back on some of what I had planned to say. The latter was in part because of the lead-ins from Chrissy, Andrew, and Jess. Because they did such a good job introducing dbatools, I was able to skip over it. But I was able to throw in a teaser for Matt Cushing’s (blog|twitter) demo at the next PSPowerHour.

Running the demos inside a VM and screen-sharing just that VM made things easier for me as opposed to flipping between apps. My scripts will be available on GitHub along with the other presenters’ once the pull request is approved.

I achieved my goals:

  1. I did it
  2. I successfully demonstrated a SQL injection problem and explained why it’s so bad
  3. I demonstrated how to make database queries from PowerShell both more reliable and safer
  4. I learned about some new stuff that I desperately want to experiment with.

Next time around, I definitely need to rehearse more and get my timing down better but overall, I’m happy.

Check it out!