It’s official! I will be speaking at the inaugural PowerHour online lightning demo event on Tuesday, August 21st at 2200 UTC. I’ll be demoing Better, Safer SQL Queries from PowerShell.
If you’re working with SQL Server from PowerShell, either as a DBA, analyst, or anyone else running queries, you’ve probably used Invoke-SqlCmd. But depending on how you’re building your queries, this can be error-prone or a huge security exposure! With the help of the dbatools module, I’ll show you how to write and run these queries better and safer - and make them easier to work into your scripts to boot.
Earlier this week, the PowerHour was announced. What is it? It’s kind of like a virtual user group. One hour, 6(ish) lightning demos (10 minutes or less), centered on PowerShell. All community-sourced and driven - anyone can submit a proposal for a demo and if accepted, you’ll be slotted into an available spot.
They’ve already set up a YouTube Channel so you can either watch live or catch up later on, and the whole deal is being organized and managed through GitHub.
This week I had a user come to me asking about how fields were defined on a few tables he was using in writing some reports. Long story short, he’s been tasked with writing some new reports and updating existing ones, but he doesn’t have visibility to the database itself so he’s left with the “ok, let’s try this” approach and then reading error messages to debug when things go sideways.
I wrote a post over on the dbatools website about how to get involved with improving comment-based help
Working on the CBH is a great way to get started with the dbatools project, even (especially) if you’re not a PowerShell expert or MVP-level DBA. Getting everything clean and consistent in the CBH is an important step on the road to 1.0. Along the way, you’ll pick up on how dbatools is put together, discover functions that you can use in your day-to-day work, and get a feel for PowerShell best practices.
This tweet showed up in the dbatools Slack channel Friday afternoon.
Just did my first Pull Request to "contribute" to @psdbatools. Granted, the code change was a single line of code that was spoon-fed to me... but it's still my 1st PR ever! Life. Changed. Special thanks to @cl for the spoon, and @wsmelton for the PR assistance. :) #dbatools
— John G Hohengarten #BlackLivesMatter (@wsuhoey) November 17, 2017 My first thought was “huh?
I registered for Summit about a month before getting actively involved in the dbatools project, so when I saw the team was running a pre-con and I was going to meet them, I was pretty excited. It was amazing getting to meet and hang out with Chrissy, Rob, CK, Shane, Jess, John, Shawn, Aaron, Ben, Kiril, Shane, and Drew (sorry if I forgot anyone!), even if it was only for a moment.
I’ve been a proponent of dbatools for close to a year now and even contributed to the project, but surprisingly haven’t been a heavy user of it. Mostly due to a lack of opportunity. I’m aware of many of the functions by virtue of working on the built-in documentation and following the project and presentations about it.
So when the need arose to move a development/test instance of SQL Server from a VM onto a physical server, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
One of the (many) fun things to do at PASS Summit is to check out the ribbons people have attached to their badges. Some are witty or goofy, others informational, others technical, and still more that let you express how you identify with a community within the community.
To celebrate dbatools and the awesome team & community around it, two limited edition badges will be available from/distributed by me and a handful of other folks all week at Summit.
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Rob Sewell and he’s posed the following question:
What are you going to automate today with PowerShell?
I’m cheating a little bit in that this is something I did a couple weeks ago, but it was immensely helpful. I’d been working on building out a new instance to migrate our test databases onto, but the developers had an urgent need to do some testing in isolation so they “borrowed” that new instance.
While working on an enhancement to dbatools, I had a need to stash a local copy of a file downloaded from the internet, but in a safe place that I could reasonably expect to be safe from accidental deletion.
User’s home directory? Maybe, but it’ll be clutter, the user might see it appear and fear that they’ve got malware. And likely deleted ina “cleanup” effort.
Create my own directory somewhere on the file system?